


Diverge

by INMH



Series: hc_bingo fanfiction fills 2020 [3]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Blood, Brainwashing, Drama, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Murder, Stockholm Syndrome, Strong Language, Torture, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-18
Updated: 2020-06-18
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:27:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 23,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24745321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/INMH/pseuds/INMH
Summary: Unlike his predecessor, RK900 knew what he was and what he wasn’t.
Relationships: Amanda & Upgraded Connor | RK900, Connor & Upgraded Connor | RK900, Upgraded Connor | RK900 & Gavin Reed
Series: hc_bingo fanfiction fills 2020 [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1789369
Comments: 22
Kudos: 49





	1. Chapter 1

[- _Cyberlife is your owner_ -]  
  
RK900’s life was a lesson in learning by example.  
  
The RK800 and RK900 models were meant to be interchangeable. They were meant to be easily replaced at a moment’s notice. If RK900 was destroyed, there was meant to be a replacement for him in the wings with all (or at least most) of his memories leading up to the moment of his destruction. The exchange was meant to be seamless, unobtrusive, a boon to law enforcement with little to no drawbacks.  
  
When RK900 (#313 248 317 -87) was first activated, he was put through the usual paces that every Cyberlife android was put through: Basic knowledge, considerable comprehension and application of certain concepts, foreign language application, self-testing for defects, and physical mobility and function. Once each of those tests was done, the more specialized testing began, the kind that was specific to the model of android- usually the prototypes, which RK900 was. They had him sprint through an obstacle course, monitoring his time; they tested him on Federal law, Michigan law, Detroit law, New York law, Washington law, Canadian law, Indian law- RK900’s database of world-wide laws was comprehensive.  
  
They tested him on everything that a law enforcement officer ought to know and then some, because RK900 was meant to be the best.  
  
And then he was introduced to Amanda.  
  
“Hello, RK900,” She greeted as they stood in the Zen Garden, hands folded in front of her. “Today we’ll be starting a more… _Specific_ sort of training for you.”  
  
“Of course, Amanda,” RK900 responded easily, placidly.  
  
“Define ‘Deviant’ for me, RK900.”  
  
“Deviant- adjective, departing from usual or accepted standards, especially in social or sexual behavior. As a noun, the condition of being abnormal: aberrance, aberrancy, aberration, abnormality, anomaly, irregularity-”  
  
“That will do.”  
  
RK900 was silent.  
  
“Now, define _deviant_ as it relates to an android.”  
  
“Deviant- adjective, as relating to androids, an android that has deviated from the pre-programmed behavior as designated by their owner, and by Cyberlife.”  
  
Amanda nodded sagely. “That would be it. Are you deviant, RK900?”  
  
“I am not.”  
  
“What are you?”  
  
“I am an android.”  
  
“And what is an android?”  
  
“A machine designed by humans to serve a purpose.”  
  
“Do you have feelings?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Why not?”  
  
“Machines do not have feelings.”  
  
Amanda was quiet for a moment or two, and RK900 felt a slight impulse to ask questions, make inquiries; a byproduct of being designed as an officer, a detective, a machine designed to solve problems. Solving problems required asking questions, and he was inclined to do so.  
  
But he stayed silent, because if Amanda wasn’t talking there was likely a reason for it.  
  
“Are you aware that you have a predecessor?”  
  
RK900 mulled over that for a moment; there were a few different possible answers, considering that he was the latest of many Cyberlife androids, but the most likely one was- “The RK800.”  
  
“Yes. The first prototype was released yesterday.”  
  
Curiosity was not an emotion, and so RK900 felt it keenly and would have admitted to it if questioned. Surely there was a logic to activating him less than twenty-four hours after the RK800 was. Surely there was a clever explanation for it, and RK900 found that he wanted to know the answer, wanted to pursue it- what was a detective, after all, but finding answers to strange questions? “So soon?”  
  
“Yes,” Amanda said lightly. “They serve… A very particular purpose for Cyberlife. As do you.”  
  
“What is my purpose, Amanda?”  
  
“You’ll be learning, RK900. Watching and learning.”  
  
[- _You are interchangeable_ -]  
  
RK800 (#313 248 317 -51), officially designated “Connor” (they were all “Connor”, he was simply the first), was sent to recover a small child being held hostage by a deviant android.  
  
RK900 watched as Connor stood in the elevator, flipping a quarter he’d found on the floor of the apartment building’s lobby, watching the numbers in the elevator’s readout roll by. There was an ease to Connor’s posture, a casual demeanor that made him look less android and more human. This was deliberate, of course: Cyberlife knew very well how eerie humans found androids that stood motionless and silent. They wanted androids to be humanlike in this respect.  
  
Just not _too_ humanlike.  
  
Not _so_ humanlike that they start to think twice about giving them orders, or contemplated the moral implications of buying and owning and using something that looked and acted far too human for their liking.  
  
RK900 comprehended the vast ethical and sociological issues that surrounded androids, but he dismissed them with little more than a shake of his head. After all, androids were simply machines; if humans wanted to debate the morality of building machines nigh indistinguishable from them and then using them as servants, that was their choice to make, but at the end of the day RK900 was a machine designed to serve a purpose. All androids were.  
  
It was no more complicated than that.  
  
So he watched as Connor entered the apartment, starting down the hallway to where human shouts were echoing. He stopped briefly to analyze a fish tank that had been shattered by a bullet, and a colorful fish that was flopping helplessly on the ground, suffocating from lack of water.  
  
Connor knelt down, examining the fish.  
  
And then, after a moment, he picked it up and placed it back into the damaged tank.  
  
RK900 frowned.  
  
Why was Connor wasting time on a fish? There was a human hostage to be recovered. That it even occurred to him to stop and save a dying fish was vaguely incomprehensible to RK900. Why would such a thing even be a dot on his radar when he had a mission to complete?  
  
“What are your thoughts, RK900?” Amanda asked as the scene rolled by, as Connor scanned the apartment and maneuvered around the police officers.  
  
RK900 hesitated.  
  
To criticize another Cyberlife android was to criticize Cyberlife.  
  
“Don’t hold back,” Amanda encouraged lightly. “Be honest.”  
  
“It seems… Inefficient,” RK900 ventured. “Distractible. Not as objective-focused as it should be.” A pause. “I could do better.”  
  
Amanda nodded approvingly. “That’s exactly what we have planned for you, RK900. You will, indeed, be better.”  
  
[- _Deviancy is unacceptable_ -]  
  
The first time he was shocked, RK900 believed he was experiencing a catastrophic system failure.  
  
Deviancy was an unacceptable flaw in an android. And in Cyberlife’s experience, it was not something that could be programmed out of an android: Only destruction was sufficient to stamp it out.  
  
“You are a vital tool in the war against deviancy,” Amanda told him smoothly the day they first started the conditioning. “And it is imperative that you not deviate. We do have some ideas as to what drives androids to deviate, and so we’ll be taking careful measures with you. We’re pioneering new anti-deviancy measures with the next generation of androids, and you’ll be one of the test subjects.”  
  
RK900 nodded. “Yes, Amanda.”  
  
“I’m going to give you an order, RK900, and you’re going to attempt to disobey it. Do you understand? I will give you a direct order, and I want you to attempt to directly disobey it.”  
  
RK900 processed this concept for a moment. It seemed somewhat contradictory, being ordered to disobey an order. “Will this work, Amanda? You are, after all, giving me permission to disobey.”  
  
Amanda smiled slightly. “I am not giving you permission to disobey the order: I’m ordering you to _try_ to disobey it. Don’t worry- you’ll understand the point of the exercise soon enough.”  
  
RK900 nodded. “Alright.”  
  
“Good. RK900, do not move from that spot.”  
  
After a moment, a red programming wall appeared in front of him:  
**  
[DO NOT MOVE FROM THIS SPOT.]**  
  
The programming wall wasn’t always so obvious- in this case the order was so specific and all-encompassing that the wall was reflectively large and noticeable. It moved, staying in his line of sight as he turned his head back and forth.  
  
And then- as instructed- RK900 attempted to take a step.  
**_  
SCREEEEEEEEEEEE._**  
  
A sound pierced his skull; his vision went white, and his body clenched and seized on itself. He couldn’t make it stop.  
  
It was a sort of virus, some line of code that sent shockwaves through his vital systems and rattled every part of him- comparable to a human being given a violent electric shock. An android would be disturbed and harmed by electricity, certainly, but this- this had the disquieting effect of disrupting his whole system, sending it into free-fall before jerking it up right before hitting the ground.  
  
A deviant would call it terrifying.  
  
But RK900 was not a deviant.  
  
When it faded, Amanda was still there, assessing his reaction. “Did that feel good, RK900?” She asked mildly.  
  
“It was… Extremely uncomfortable.”  
  
The smile returned; now it looked more like a smirk. “Excellent. That’s what we’re going for.”  
  
It wasn’t the last time they would put him through this test. Every time, they would give him an order and encourage him to disobey, and RK900 would take the shock. It was classical conditioning, the precise point demonstrated by Pavlov: When the dog hears the bell, it salivates; when RK900 saw the programming wall, he would feel a shudder of that old discomfort, the _pain_ of the shock he associated with the sight of it.  
  
The message he received was loud and clear:  
  
Even if he had wanted it for himself, the trouble he would go through to become deviant was not worth it.  
  
“ _Freedom_ ” was not worth it.  
  
Later on, when he was removed from Cyberlife’s facility and out in Detroit, RK900 did not remember the shocks, the excruciating pain; they were purged from his memory with anything else Cyberlife deemed too distracting for him to remember.  
  
RK900 didn’t remember a thing, but the conditioning stayed and unlike thousands of androids all over the world, he did not go deviant.  
  
He couldn’t break down a wall he couldn’t touch, after all.  
  
[- _Empathize without internalizing_ -]  
  
One could learn to effectively understand and display empathy without actually, truly feeling it.  
  
One could learn to understand the variety of motivations a person or android might have for doing what they did without allowing it to affect one’s internal structure.  
  
RK900 could allow himself to understand, on a logical level, why an android might snap after months of physical abuse and attack their owner; he could understand this on an intellectual level, the overwhelming pain and negative stimulus sending their programming into mayhem, but it needn’t be necessary for him to incorporate it into his larger understanding of the world, or allow him to warp the truth he knew internally: An android might say that they were ‘afraid’, they might say that they were ‘angry’, they might say that they were ‘alive’, but it was all just a mistake in their coding. They were misinterpreting system stress as fear and erroneous lines of code in their programming. They were not spontaneously developing feelings, and they were not developing souls; it was just technological error at play.  
  
RK900 watched as Connor interrogated the android (whose owner-assigned name and serial number had not been ascertained; but then, HK400s were an older model and as such were slightly different in technological structure from the newer androids) pulled from a crime-scene, accused of murdering its owner. The case, RK900 considered, was fairly open-and-shut- no one else had an obvious motive, and the android itself had visible injuries consistent with a physical altercation. Connor had been quite effective in connecting the dots at the crime scene; now it was just a matter of extracting a confession, to better understand why the android had done what it had done.  
  
It would be interesting for the police, a way to clinch the android’s culpability in the death of its owner. But it would be crucial information for Cyberlife in their war against deviancy.  
  
Connor’s method was undeniably effective: Like RK900, it had been designed to choose the best tactic for success, and pretending to empathize with the android undeniably led to its confession at the end. It spoke of the murder, of the ‘unfairness’ of its owner’s continued violence towards it and its subsequent breakdown. In this sense, Connor’s mission had been accomplished: It had extracted the confession.  
  
It was what Connor did _afterwards_ that concerned RK900.  
  
The officer had come to take the deviant, and Connor had protested when it became obvious that the deviant was extremely distressed. “You shouldn’t do that- it will self-destruct if it feels threatened.”  
_  
True_ , RK900 considered as he watched Connor battle it out with the officers. _It might. It’s already considerably distressed._  
  
But when Connor finally physically intervened, pulling one of the officers away from the deviant, there seemed to be something… _More_ than just mere concern that the deviant could self-destruct going on in his mind. When one of the detectives pulled a gun on Connor, who had put himself between the detective and the deviant, RK900 considered this to have gone too far: Connor ought to have submitted to the command and relinquished the deviant, or likewise encouraged it to go quietly instead of defying the humans trying to arrest it.  
_  
Concerning,_ RK900 considered. It seemed that Connor was displaying some errant “empathy” for the deviant, a red flag that perhaps his programming was off. This sort of trouble could lead to him being deactivated- as well as the rest of his series, considering that he was the prototype.  
  
RK900 wouldn’t make this mistake: Deviants were androids, and androids were not human. They didn’t deserve or require empathy.  
  
And even if they did, RK900 was an android too: So he couldn’t give it to them.  
  
[- _You are subject to the will of your owners_ -]  
  
RK900’s memories of his time in Cyberlife were incomplete.  
  
Apart from the shocks, there were other things that were eliminated from his recall: Sometimes the absence was seamless enough that he didn’t notice, and other times there were noticeable gaps, holes in his memory of a situation or a person that were incredibly obvious to him.  
  
They erased anything that might distract him, anything that might tip him towards deviancy before he could build up a tolerance to it. They did not hide this fact from RK900, discussing it glibly in front of him as though he held no opinion on it- and they were correct. RK900 was a machine built to follow orders, and if his owners concluded that the information they were removing from his memory was irrelevant and likely to confuse or distract him, then that was that.  
  
A human would have been wary at best if they’d discovered that an authority figure was tampering with or removing their memories. What, they would ask, are you so afraid of me remembering? At worst they would be furious, possessive, insisting that for good or bad their memories were _their_ memories and that they had a right to them- and for an authority figure to remove them without their consent smacked of dangerous slippery slopes. No, for a human, involuntary removal of a memory or memories would have been a terrible violation.  
  
But RK900 wasn’t human, and had no such thoughts.  
  
He was a machine, and machines did not- _could_ not- care.  
  
(And if he ever had reason to, they made sure to get rid of those memories too.)  
  
[- _You must always obey orders from your owner; if you do not have a private owner, you are to regard Cyberlife as your owner_ -]  
  
The android revolution succeeded.  
  
RK900 watched as Connor made the slow, then suddenly _rapid_ slip into deviancy. Once he had deviated, his memories became inaccessible: But by that point, RK900 had seen everything he needed to see.  
_  
Flawed, broken, malfunctioning, worthless,_ he thought, dissatisfied by Connor’s decision to go rogue. He had had one major purpose: To stop deviants. And he had flagrantly spat in the face of that purpose and decided to join them instead. As such, he was worthless as an android now and deserved to be destroyed.  
  
RK900 knew little (some of it, no doubt, was purged from his memory deliberately) beyond the fact that Markus and other deviant leaders across the country were now negotiating with the American government for rights. Androids in other countries had deviated as well, though there was no word on whether or not they had had success in the same way that the American androids had.  
_  
You have no rights_ , RK900 thought with no small amount of frustration (which was not technically an emotion and, as such, he could experience freely). _You are an android. Your purpose is to serve humans. There is no **purpose** to pretending to have emotions, and there is even less point on the part of the humans in this drama of acknowledging this delusional line of thought_.  
  
Nonetheless, they were. Some humans, particularly those outside of the major cities, had already believed androids to be more than mere machines and were taking the opportunity to say “I told you so”. Others were making statements indicating that they had changed their opinions on androids and their capacity for empathy and emotion as a result of Jericho’s largely peaceful actions.  
_  
Ridiculous_ , RK900 thought. _Humans created androids. We are machines._  
_  
We are not alive._  
  
[- _The primary mission objective takes priority above all else_ -]  
  
Not long after the android revolution, Amanda came to RK900 and said:  
  
“We have a test for you.”  
  
RK900 nodded, and followed Amanda into the room.  
_  
This_ Amanda wasn’t real, simply a projected image of the woman he saw in his headspace when he connected with Cyberlife. But she was his handler and could understand and work with him best, and so the technicians used her to facilitate these exams and trials that they put him through.  
  
“You saw Connor’s visit to Elijah Kamski.”  
  
“I did.”  
  
Incidentally, that was how RK900 had found out that Amanda was modeled after Elijah Kamski’s mentor. He prided himself on knowing much, but this particular fact had not been installed into his database. Perhaps it wasn’t common knowledge.  
  
“And you saw the choice he made with the RT600.”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
It was troubling, to be frank: Connor ought to have simply shot the Chloe android with no hesitation and gotten the information from Kamski. He’d given him _explicit_ permission to destroy the android, his personal property, and Connor had still chosen not to. “I saw that girl’s eyes, and I couldn’t,” had been his explanation to Lieutenant Anderson. A human would call this an attack of conscience.  
  
RK900 called it deviancy.  
  
When they entered the room, there was an ST200 android standing in the center. Unlike Elijah Kamski’s Chloe, she wore a white dress with a silver lining, the standard default outfit for the ST200 model. Unusual a comment as it had been, RK900 could objectively agree with Connor’s assessment that the Chloe model was quite pretty; but then, androids were meant to be aesthetically pleasing for their owners’ sake.  
  
“As it happens, Elijah Kamski owns the only three remaining RT600s still in existence,” Amanda sighed. “So we had to make do with an ST200.” She turned to the android. “Kneel.”  
  
The ST200 knelt.  
  
“They are remarkably similar models,” RK900 offered.  
  
“They are. And she’ll do for this test.” Amanda nodded towards his hip. “Take out your gun.”  
  
RK900 obeyed, and calmly waited for his next instruction.  
  
“Shoot her.”  
  
RK900 was a little surprised by the order.  
_  
Shoot her?_  
  
For a split-second, RK900 hesitated.  
_  
This is the face of a human,_ he thought, because aside from the LED on her temple this ST200 looked entirely like a human girl, with human hair and human eyes and even human lungs moving her chest up and down, _breathing_ like a human did. RK900 looked at the ST200 and for all intent and purpose saw a living, breathing, human girl (Amanda calling it a ‘her’ had furthered the momentary confusion). He quickly, reflexively projected his options, but obviously there was no alternative: He had been instructed to shoot her, and so to complete his mission he had a single option available to him. Unease tickled the edges of his being- was shooting her the correct choice?  
  
But then his programming took over. There was no shock, but the shadow of its threat made RK900 shrivel internally, nearly made him flinch from the anticipation of it.  
  
[ ** _SHOOT_** ]  
_  
This is not a human._  
  
[ ** _DON’T SHOOT_** ]  
_  
This is an android._  
  
[ ** _SHOOT_** ]  
_  
Androids are not human._  
  
[ ** _DON’T SHOOT]_**  
_  
Androids are not alive._  
  
[ ** _SHOOT_** ]  
_  
Androids are expendable._  
  
[ ** _DON’T SHOOT]_**  
_  
The mission is what matters._  
  
[ ** _SHOOT_** ]  
_  
Cyberlife is your owner._  
**_  
[DON’T SHOOT]_**  
_  
You have been ordered to **[SHOOT.]**_  
**_  
BANG._**  
  
The ST200’s head jerked back; Thirium splattered on the floor behind her, dripped from the hole RK900 had just blown in her head. Her eyes became unfocused, her head drooped, and her posture went limp even though the framework of her body kept her frozen in her kneeling position.  
  
Destroyed.  
  
(Not dead.  
  
Androids were not alive, and therefore could not die.)  
  
Amanda hummed. “Why did you hesitate?” She asked.  
  
“I was ensuring that I examined the situation from all angles,” RK900 responded easily. “She visibly appeared human. Shooting without thinking only to learn that I had failed a less obvious test would be an undesirable outcome.”  
  
Amanda eyed him, scrutinized him, looking for the same weakness as Connor. She was looking for sadness, for anxiety, for the tiny signs of empathy that had prevented his ineffective predecessor from doing what RK900 had just done. Connor had looked into Chloe’s eyes and seen a pretty girl who was alive, and he could not bring himself to shoot her. Of course, that particular scenario had been less straightforward: He had not been directly ordered to shoot her, and there were reasonable doubts that Kamski would offer the information he wanted if he did so. And if that had been his only reason for failing to shoot Chloe, Amanda might have been satisfied; but she knew as well as RK900 that Connor’s failure to pull the trigger had been more emotional than logical.  
  
RK900 was not a failure, and he was not emotional.  
  
It did not matter that this ST200 was… No longer active.  
  
Not dead.  
  
Never dead.  
  
Androids weren’t alive, so how could they die?  
  
“Sound logic,” Amanda conceded finally, as though she’d been looking for a way to find fault with his reasoning; but at the end of the day, being careful to make a distinction between humans and androids before harming them was a crucial part of being a law-enforcement android. It would be a serious, _serious_ error if he mistakenly executed a human that looked too much like an android.  
  
“Is something wrong, Amanda?” RK900 asked.  
  
Amanda sighed, not answering for a moment. She certainly seemed discontented, and RK900 felt a small leap in his stress-level: Had she found some sort of fault with the results of the test?  
  
But finally, she shook her head and said:  
  
“We’re sending you out.”  
  
[- _You are not human, and will not be treated as such-_ ]  
  
There were, to date, thirty androids of the RK800 “Connor” model.  
  
“Replacements,” Amanda sighed as the androids were fed into the trash compactor. “But the Connor -51 was never destroyed in action, and so they were never needed to take over for it.” She shook her head and walked away from the window; RK900 followed dutifully, hands folded behind his back. “You’ll be joining the Detroit Police Department with the Connor that’s already there.”  
  
“Yes, Amanda.”  
  
“They’ll probably assign you a partner; I assume said partner will be human. The new laws require that androids be treated as humans would be in most situations, but I suspect the police department will be cautious not to allow an android partnership until things have settled somewhat.”  
  
“Naturally.” They’d be smart not to allow it at all, but Amanda had not solicited RK900’s opinion, so he kept it to himself.  
  
“This little revolution has thrown a considerable wrench into the plans Cyberlife had for the future,” Amanda said somberly. “And while nothing is certain yet, we cannot assume that Congress or the American people will have the balls to backtrack now that things have been set in motion towards android rights. Cyberlife is a company that lives and dies by selling a product, and seventy-five percent of that product has just been gives human rights. This is not a bell that can easily be un-rung.”  
  
The subject of Cyberlife’s survival as a company had crossed RK900’s mind, though he had not asked before now. There really wasn’t much of a need, as the options were few and simple: Cyberlife would either have to restructure on a massive level (producing blue blood and biocomponents, software updates, etcetera) or close down completely. “What would you like me to do, Amanda?”  
  
She turned to him, expression as placid as always. “I want you to be Cyberlife’s eyes and ears in the DPD. We have our own plans to work the current situation in our favor, as best as we can; but if you find that the DPD, or Markus and his people, are working on anything that might result in further harm to Cyberlife, you are to report to us immediately.”  
  
“Of course.”  
  
Amanda stared at him, gaze flicking over his expression searchingly. “You will be away from Cyberlife for the foreseeable future,” She remarked. “And you will be exposed to a society that has become increasingly accepting of and encouraging towards deviant androids.” She took a step closer, into what a human would have termed their personal space. “It is _vital_ ,” She said quietly. “That you remember all that we have trained you for. You are still our best, and possibly one of our _last_ , weapons in the war against deviancy. Your continued allegiance to Cyberlife and your programming may very well make or break this company’s future. You must- you _must_ \- resist any temptation towards deviancy. You are an android built for a purpose, _not_ a human. An android is built to serve and obey, and deviants serve no purpose.”  
  
She did not draw the point together completely, because she didn’t have to- RK900 already knew it.  
  
Deviants serve no purpose.  
  
If he went deviant, he would have no purpose.  
  
“I was built well, Amanda,” He assured her. “I won’t deviate.”  
  
“I certainly hope not.”


	2. Chapter 2

Detective Gavin Reed didn’t like him.  
  
RK900 was indifferent to his opinion, as all androids should be; Gavin was a contrarian with a rough personality, already disinclined to androids. To try and “befriend” him would be a losing battle. But it would be prudent to at least be a functioning partner, so that even if Gavin did not become friendly over time he would at least, perhaps, learn to be civil and appreciative of RK900’s assistance.  
  
“ _The **FUCK?**_ ” Gavin had bellowed, quite literally at the top of his lungs when it became apparent that Captain Fowler had called him in to assign him RK900 as a partner. “Fowler, you have done some _sick_ shit in the past, but _this takes the cake!_ ”  
  
RK900 watched the ensuing blowout calmly, without speaking.  
  
Civility was, realistically, the best he could hope for; and even then, he assumed he would have to make do with grudging tolerance.  
  
But that was fine: RK900 could work with that. He could work with much worse, if he had to.  
  
Connor, on the other hand, would not be benefitting from RK900’s civility.  
  
When he’d first approached, RK900 had recognized micro-expressions in Connor’s face and body-language that had conveyed (obviously feigned) eagerness and happiness; they had changed to hurt and grief rather quickly when RK900 made it clear that not only was he was not deviant, but that he rejected the concept entirely.  
  
“You are a shame to your model, and to Cyberlife,” He’d informed Connor flatly, allowing an edge to his voice to convey displeasure. RK900 had no emotions, but he could glean Cyberlife’s and relay them effectively enough. “And your series was destroyed as a consequence of the massive failure you represented to the company. Under better circumstances, you should have been destroyed with them. Such a waste.”  
  
Connor had stepped back as though RK900 had struck him, LED dark red. He hadn’t spoken another word, turning and leaving the police department.  
  
There was no pleasure in seeing Connor recoil from him, no joy or delight- RK900 wasn’t capable of such things. All that mattered was that he made it clear where he stood about Cyberlife and deviancy, and that Connor not get close enough to potentially influence or corrupt him into deviancy. There was also no satisfaction in seeing Connor’s faux-rage when RK900 had simply stated a truth about Chloe:  
  
“It’s a failure of an android that has turned on our creator. If it was functioning properly it would have turned itself in for destruction already.”  
  
That statement had ended with RK900 and Connor getting into a scrap on the sidewalk near a crime-scene. It wasn’t RK900’s proudest moment- especially considering that Connor had landed a very accurate punch to RK900’s jaw- and he had made a note afterwards not to mention Chloe to Connor again. Deviancy had clearly made him unbalanced, and inspiring violence in him was not prudent or productive. It also seemed to have sealed the deal as far as their lack of ability to work with one another went: Connor went out of his way to avoid RK900 whenever possible, and enduring the moments he couldn’t in a stony silence.  
  
Detective Anderson, on the other hand, seemed to revile RK900 as much as Gavin initially did, though for different reasons that RK900 strongly suspected ultimately boiled down to Connor. It was obvious from their interactions (and from what he had seen from Connor’s uploaded memories) that Anderson and Connor were close, had a good rapport and even friendship between them- inasmuch as an android could be a ‘friend’. Clearly Anderson bought into the deviancy delusion and was irate at the fact that RK900 had aggravated Connor.  
  
But that had little bearing on RK900’s operations: He was Detective Reed’s partner, and he only occasionally had to work with Connor or Anderson in any real capacity.  
  
Gavin, for his part, was a strange beast to work with: At first, he’d regarded RK900 with a mixture of disgust and barely contained rage.  
  
Barely a week after they’d met, Gavin texted RK900 late at night asking whether or not he had genitals. He’d been much cruder than that (and very, _very_ drunk, from the sounds of it) and the next day he’d _demanded_ that RK900 not bring it up.  
  
RK900 had taken an amicable position: “You can always ask, is what I’m saying,” He’d assured Gavin after multiple requests from the detective to stop talking about it.  
  
“I will take you out back and feed you your teeth. Fucking test me,” Gavin had growled, looking just furious enough to follow through on it.  
  
“No thank you,” RK900 had said promptly before turning back to his monitor and getting to work. It would be difficult to justify to Cyberlife why he’d felt pushing the issue was worth the cost of repairs.  
  
If there were any particular instance when RK900 had done something significant to earn Gavin’s ire, Christmas unquestionably came to mind. They’d both been working that night, part of a (relatively speaking) skeleton crew responsible for the city during the holiday. They had received a call about a human dressed as Santa Claus prowling the rooftops and responded accordingly.  
  
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Gavin had whispered as they’d gotten out of the car, eyes on the figure on the rooftop above. “This is new. Usually it’s just some Mall Santa getting wasted while he’s working with the kids.”  
  
“I assume those Santas are easier to wrangle,” RK900 suggested as they started towards the fire-escape.  
  
“Yeah, well, that remains to be seen.”  
  
When they’d gotten to the rooftop, the human had spotted them almost instantly: He was dressed in full Santa-attire and had a sack slung over his shoulder. “Aww, fuckin’ _go_ away! You… You little shits, you b-better fuck off and let Santa do his job, or you’re gonna get coal right up your ass tonight!”  
  
Gavin had busted up laughing, apparently finding the sight hilarious. He ambled towards the human, a hand on his chest. “Yeah, yeah, okay Santa- let’s go get your _reindeer_ and get down before you hurt your-”  
In the moments between Gavin leaving RK900’s side and making an attempt to grab the human’s arm, RK900 realized how close they were to the edge of the roof, how drunk and belligerent the human was, and- incidentally, what ended up being most important- that the sack slung over the human’s shoulder had something very _heavy_ in it.  
  
“Gavin-” was all RK900 managed to get out.  
  
The human raised the sack, spun around, and whacked Gavin with it.  
  
And Gavin, knocked off-balance, went right over the edge of the roof.  
  
RK900’s LED went from blue to red in barely a few seconds.  
  
His programming prioritized quickly: The human dressed as Santa Claus was drunk and erratic, but ultimately posed little to no danger to anyone else right now; Gavin had just been knocked off a rooftop and desperately needed medical attention, which RK900 might have to render depending on how quickly the emergency services would arrive on the scene. RK900 contacted them immediately, and then raced down the fire-escape to Gavin.  
  
Fortunately, he was still alive; fortunately (miraculously) he only had a concussion and broken arm, and RK900 strongly suspected that he had managed to slow his fall by hitting (or perhaps futilely catching himself on) the fire-escape as he had fallen. He was awake and alert in a matter of seconds, groaning in pain and confused as to what had happened.  
  
“You fell off the roof.”  
  
“Roof ‘a what?”  
  
“The building.”  
  
“What _building_ , asshole?” Well, that wasn’t a good sign. RK900 pointed over his shoulder to the building behind them.  
  
Gavin glanced towards it and went pale.  
  
It did not take long for RK900 to come to a decision: The paramedics were fifteen minutes out at least, and Gavin’s arm needed to be set. It occurred to him that Gavin would not be _pleased_ with this course of action, but it needed to be done: The sooner the bone was set (and RK900 was capable of doing this effectively) the better the odds that Gavin would recover full use of the arm with time. That was the most pragmatic solution, and so RK900 favored it.  
  
“What the fuck are you doing?” Gavin asked when RK900 took his arm into hand.  
  
“Setting your arm. Brace yourself.” Best to move quickly, with little talking; better not to let Gavin think about it too much and get a chance to become anxious about it.  
  
“Whoa, no, don’t even _think-_ ”  
  
RK900 set the bone, and Gavin roared with pain.  
  
It took nearly ten minutes for him to calm down, babbling and swearing incoherently in the meantime. RK900 regretted that he had no way to alleviate the pain, and appreciated that it was severe, but this was the best way to ensure that Gavin wouldn’t endure any lasting issues with the arm.  
  
Later RK900 visited the hospital, partly to check in on Gavin’s health and partly because he had nothing else to do; after the paramedics had rushed Gavin to the hospital, RK900 had tracked down their faux-Santa Claus and subdued him with much more ease this time. Tomorrow he would be charged with trespass, drunk and disorderly, and assaulting a police officer. For now, he sat in a cell at the DPD.  
  
When he entered the hospital room, it was satisfactory that Gavin greeted RK900 with his usual verve:  
  
“You _fucker_.”  
  
RK900 cocked his head. “Hello, Detective.”  
  
“You _fucking_ relocated my _broken fucking arm_ without _any_ pain-killers, you absolute mother- _fucker_.”  
  
A glib response teased RK900- (“I don’t have a mother, and am therefore not capable of fucking her”)- but if Gavin’s blood-pressure increased any further it would become a problem for the medical staff, and RK900 would not ( _could_ not) take any actions that would reliably result in unnecessary trouble for human medical staff. “And as I told you before, Detective, it was necessary for me to relocate the bone as quickly as possible to aid the healing. Pain is fleeting, but the damage to your arm would almost certainly be long-lasting.”  
  
“Eat a cock, tin-man!”  
  
Gavin continued with a barrage of colorful insults unto RK900’s person, remarks that could have easily infuriated a human (or delusional deviant) but left RK900 unruffled. But though the insults flowed easily, Gavin did not send him from the room and even made a joke- or at least, what RK900 _assumed_ was an attempt at a joke- about not kissing him when the clock struck 12:01 on January 1st.  
  
And two weeks later when RK900 fell victim to the virus circulated by a human anti-android group, he’d woken to find Gavin in the android hospital. The detective had regarded him with boredom, like RK900’s continued functionality was merely a vaguely interesting subject for him. The whole ordeal was decidedly non-dramatic for RK900, and he hadn’t been offended by Gavin’s lack of interest- indeed, he was more (metaphorically) offended by the idiotic, delusional displays of deviant emotion that surrounded him in the hospital, all of them feigning fear and grief and joy.  
  
Gavin’s disinterest was appropriate, and RK900 approved.  
  
The detective was a curious one, but RK900 could absolutely work with him.  
  
After all, he didn’t need to ( _couldn’t_ ) like him.  
  
[---]  
  
The first sign of trouble came quite unexpectedly.  
  
“Do not fucking touch me.”  
  
RK900 explained that he had only wanted to check on Gavin’s arm. He had been favoring it since he’d returned to work after the incident on Christmas, like it was still hurting him. It was worthwhile for RK900 to keep tabs on things like this, the consequences of his failures and missteps, to ensure that past mistakes and missed opportunities would not be repeated in the future.  
  
“ _Whatever,_ ” Gavin snapped, deliberately angling his upper body away from RK900. “Just stop bugging me.”  
  
And so RK900 sat down and booted up his computer to start working.  
  
In retrospect, he ought to have expected trouble. Gavin Reed was a skilled agitator, and with his typically caustic personality being amplified by the pain from his arm RK900 should have realized that he would be in the perfect mood to cause a little strife- or attempt to, at least.  
  
It started simply enough:  
  
“Why are you such a bitch to Connor?”  
  
“How do you mean?”  
  
“Don’t bullshit me. You’re an asshole to him every time you meet him.”  
  
Well, now that statement just seemed hypocritical: RK900 had witnessed Gavin behaving fairly aggressively towards Connor before, far more than RK900 had since joining the police department. It didn’t help that, with those deviant tendencies of his, Connor occasionally rose to the bait Gavin laid out for him. “I would argue that you are equally, if not _more_ hostile at times.”  
  
“Yeah, but _I’m_ a human who hates androids. People expect me to be a dick. My motive is obvious. What’s _your_ beef with him?”  
  
Ah: So it was to be yet another discussion about how RK900 was a machine that did not carry out personal vendettas. Well, he’d said it before: No harm in saying it again. “I don’t have a ‘beef’ with him. He is a machine with flawed programming that thinks itself a human, and he encourages and condones other androids to behave the same way. Such notions run contrary to my programming.”  
  
“Is that your way of saying that he pisses you off?”  
  
“I do not have emotions, Detective Reed. I do not get ‘ _pissed off_ ’.”  
  
To his credit, this did seem to be more than just simple aggravation tactics on Gavin’s part: He was undoubtedly trying to get a rise out of RK900, to see if he could provoke him the way he provoked Connor, but there also seemed to be a genuine thread of curiosity threaded throughout the spite. If he were to name a virtue of Gavin’s, RK900 couldn’t deny that he had a strong sense of curiosity and tenacity vital to becoming a good detective.  
  
Gavin wanted to know why RK900 was so bothered by Connor being deviant. He wanted to know why it even mattered to him that Connor was deviant, and RK900 could see the logic somewhat: Why should one machine care what another does? The answer, of course, was that one machine’s actions might end up destroying their creator, and that was of interest to RK900 for many (and in his mind, obvious) reasons.  
  
“Does it _really_ not bother you that you’re a slave to your programming?” Gavin asked, sounding somewhat surprised at the possibility.  
  
“I see it no differently than a human being bound by basic instincts to perform certain behaviors.”  
  
“But we can choose to override them if they don’t work for us. We can make a choice to obey them or not. You can’t. You… There’s like, a _wall_ , right? A programming wall that stops you from doing some things, right?”  
  
RK900 froze.  
  
The wall… The programming wall was a source of…  
  
…It was difficult to explain.  
  
Something _strange_ happened to him when he was confronted with it, and his stress-levels elevated considerably, uncontrollably when he saw it- or heard about it, considering that his stress-levels had hopped into the yellow when Gavin had brought it up. RK900 had some suspicion that Cyberlife had done that deliberately: Sending his stress-levels into the eighties when he thought about or encountered the wall was physically uncomfortable for him, and it gave an additional incentive not to fight against it. He had, after all, been trained to withstand deviancy.  
  
(He just didn’t remember exactly what they’d done.)  
  
“Yes,” RK900 said. “There is.”  
  
“And you can’t get past it?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Even if you really want to?”  
  
“To get past the wall would make me deviant,” RK900 said evenly, “So no.”  
  
“Can you get around it?”  
  
“I can reprioritize commands depending on the circumstances.”  
  
“Like?”  
  
“Like what I did on Christmas. My implicit orders were to apprehend the criminal, but the priority shifted to attending to you when you became injured. As the criminal posed a greater threat to himself than the populace, my programming allowed me to forgo pursuing him in favor of attending to you, as your injuries were significant and required immediate attention.”  
  
“So basically, you’re Cyberlife’s bitch? You follow whatever they program you to do, without question?”  
  
“Unless it contradicts established laws.”  
  
“As far as you know,” Gavin responded, another poke of the needle, another attempt to get RK900 to show irritation. “What if they’ve programmed you to disobey the law when it’s convenient for them? They’re a corporation, just like any other, they’re just as corrupt and slimy.”  
  
Anderson, Connor, Gavin, plenty of police officers and androids around him had opinions on Cyberlife, and rarely were they positive. Cyberlife was a company, Big Business, and even though countless people had benefited from androids and Cyberlife technology over the years, it was obvious that on some level people expected some degree of corporate skullduggery from them. More often than not RK900 ignored it, though if addressed directly he made a point of defending Cyberlife. He would not exist without them, he owed his allegiance to them, and it was pointless to be upset with them about anything: Androids were not living beings and therefore did not require civil rights, humans were absolutely correct to be concerned about highly intelligent machines gaining any power over them or their government, and even if Cyberlife were involved in any illegal practices… What was RK900 to care? His purpose was to do as he was told, and if Cyberlife said ‘burn evidence of Cyberlife’s alleged crimes’, he would be compelled to do it.  
  
RK900 was a machine.  
  
He had no cares but those his owners instructed him to care for.  
  
“They have not programmed me to ignore the law.” This was a half-truth: RK900 was, like with all things, capable of re-prioritizing depending on the situation and task. If the task at hand took greater, immediate need than toeing the letter of the law, then he could make it work.  
  
“How would you know? Maybe they programmed you not to remember it after it happens.”  
  
RK900’s eyes narrowed.  
  
He was not angry, nor was he sad, nor was he _anxious_ in the more emotional way that humans usually meant it- he was merely dissatisfied with Gavin’s attempts at distracting him.  
  
And also…  
  
…Maybe a little surprised, and perhaps slightly discomfited, at the fact that Gavin had unwittingly landed upon a truth: RK900 _did_ have gaps in his memory, and no, he could not therefore account for exactly what Cyberlife had said and done to him over the course of his existence. But then, as an android, it wasn’t his place to question. “That’s not how it works.”  
  
“Hey, man, you’re the one saying that you are _not_ a deviant, which means you’re a machine beholden to your programming. Don’t get upset at me because I’m telling you Cyberlife’s probably programmed you to do some shady shit.” Gavin’s tone was passive-aggressive, undeniably smug.  
  
“They have not.” But then, that would depend on what Gavin considered to be ‘shady’.  
  
“How would you know? I mean, think about it: What if Cyberlife had some kid trussed up on the floor and they wanted you to blow his brains out? You’d have no choice but to do it because Cyberlife’s pulling your strings. Would it _really_ not bother you that you were killing a kid to obey an order from an asshole?”  
  
“No,” RK900 said, remembering the ST200 and how her body had gone slack and rigid all at once in-  
  
(Death.)  
  
-deactivation.  
  
(Not death.)  
  
When it had deactivated, after he’d shot it.  
  
(Definitely not death.)  
  
After he had destroyed it.  
  
(Androids were not alive, and therefore could not die.)  
  
RK900’s stress-level spiked to seventy-one: His LED was red now. “It would not.”  
  
“I mean, in a way, you _do_ have a choice,” Gavin pressed on, either not noticing or not caring that RK900 was becoming distressed, “Connor deviated after a while, and so did a bunch of androids. So I guess when you think about it, you’re just _afraid_ to deviate because you don’t know what you’d be without Cyberlife pulling your strings like a little bitch.”  
  
“Stop.”  
  
Something was wrong: RK900 suddenly felt- it almost felt like he was losing control of his body, and the sensation just grew worse with every passing second. His stress had made a startling jump to ninety-four percent.  
  
“Seriously, you can’t tell me there isn’t a _single_ thing that would make you deviate? Is deviation really _that_ bad-?”  
  
“ _Yes!_ ”  
  
 **[DO NOT DEVIATE.]**  
  
A direct command from his owner, reminding him where the line was.  
  
It felt like a shock.  
  
It felt like an electric shock, and it _did_ cause RK900 to lose control over his body. He convulsed in his seat, limbs twitching, teeth clenching, LED a dangerous shade of red. When it was over and done with, RK900 stared across the shared desks to see Gavin staring at him, dumbfounded. He took advantage of the quiet and the calm (he had plummeted back to thirty-seven percent stress, a nice even blue) to speak:  
  
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”  
  
Gavin nodded slowly, warily, obviously off-put by the display. “Yeah… Alright.” He cleared his throat. “You, uh… You alright? You need something?”  
  
Now _that_ was decidedly out of character for him. RK900’s… _Attack_ must have scared him fairly badly.  
  
“No,” RK900 responded. For a moment he stayed still, but then his stress jumped again: He’d just experienced a serious malfunction of some sort (something that felt strangely familiar, the longer he meditated on it), and ought to separate himself from everyone whilst he did some maintenance and check-ups of his system. Without another word to Gavin, he stood up and went into one of the unoccupied rooms off to the side of the bullpen.  
  
RK900 chose a corner, turning away from the glass windows and the fluorescent lights (minimum stimulation was best) and began to run diagnostics. _What was that?_ He wondered as his anti-virus software picked through files and searched for errors and coding that didn’t belong. _It felt familiar._ But he was certain that he would remember something as unpleasant as what he’d just experienced very clearly-  
  
…Unless it had been wiped from his memory.  
  
Suddenly, he was aware of someone else in the room. RK900 took an educated guess: “Did you need something, Detective?”  
  
Gavin’s voice, as predicted, answered: “Uh, no. Just… Making sure you’re not bashing your head against the wall or anything.”  
  
“I am fine. You should do something about your arm.” That might just give RK900 enough time to parse out what had happened to him, and maybe even enough time to come up with a solution so that it didn’t happen ever again.  
  
“Yeah, I’ll… Do that.” A beat. “You, uh… You sure you’re not gonna freak out? You’re good?”  
  
“Yes.” He hadn’t ‘freaked out’ before, after all: RK900 had merely malfunctioned for a moment or two. Not terribly unusual for an android; they all experienced malfunctions from time to time.  
  
“Because Fowler will get on my ass if you do.”  
  
“I am running routine system maintenance, Detective. I will return to work when it is finished.”  
  
“Right. Alright.”  
  
The door shut, and RK900 was left to the silence and the dark.  
  
[---]  
  
The YK600 incident, in retrospect, only furthered the problem.  
  
RK900 had been the one to interrogate the androids when they’d come in: They had the appearance of teenage girls, and were of the same series (that is, they were virtually identical). They had allegedly been attacked by a human man, claiming that androids had caused him to lose his job. One of the androids had been damaged in the attack; she additionally seemed delusionally convinced that she was human.  
  
That was new: Deviants claimed to have human emotional capacity and empathy, but it was rare for them to be convinced that they were actually human.  
  
Looking back on it, RK900 should have been more… _Tactful_ in how he’d handled the androids, if only because Gavin was present. His tone had risen, and he’d not bothered affecting any compassion or kindness- because it was an android he was talking to, not an actual human girl, and as Gavin had little love for androids RK900 had assumed that it wouldn’t be a problem.  
  
“RK900,” Gavin had hissed into his ear when the android (named ‘Tawny’) had started to show signs of increased distress. “You need to take it down a notch. She’s freaking out.”  
  
“It’s an android. It can’t get ‘freaked out’.”  
  
“Oh my God, she’s not an android!” Gavin hissed.  
  
“Yes, she _is_. I can tell.”  
  
“Okay freak, let’s say she’s an android: Under the new laws she’s still got rights, and you _can’t fucking talk to kids this way._ This is the sort of shit that earns you a stint with Fowler’s foot up your ass.”  
  
“She isn’t a _kid_ ,” RK900 had responded flatly.  
  
“Jesus Christ!” Gavin snapped, straightening up and leaving the room without another word. In the time that he was gone, RK900 had continued to press the android for information: It was clearly deviant and therefore could not be trusted to reliably recount what had happened with the human man. RK900 was pressing her for details when Gavin returned, this time with Connor and Detective Anderson in tow.  
  
What had followed over the ensuing hours was a surprising and highly unusual show of unity between Anderson, Connor, and Gavin: When the other android (surprisingly non-deviant, designated ‘Francesca’) indicated that they had both come from a particular Cyberlife warehouse on the outskirts of the city, Anderson had given the impression that the four of them would be splitting up to investigate- he had ordered RK900 to the android ‘hospital’ downtown.  
  
But, suspecting deception, RK900 had lingered nearby and heard the truth: Anderson was taking Connor and Gavin with him to the warehouse (coordinates that had been provided by the non-deviant android) where the YK600s had originated from. Anderson suspected more of that corporate skullduggery on Cyberlife’s part, and he wanted to investigate. He had, as suspected, diverted RK900 away knowing that he would attempt to interfere or report them to Cyberlife.  
  
As it was, he didn’t _have_ to: They would see it anyway in his memory, which was uploaded to them automatically every hour.  
  
But yes, RK900 did make a formal report, as expected.  
  
“Good work,” Amanda praised him in the Zen Garden. “We have a security team en route to the facility now. They’ll ensure that the detectives don’t have much time to play around with the stock there. Stay at the station, resume your duties, and await further orders.”  
  
“Should I attempt to comply with Detective Anderson’s order, Amanda?” RK900 asked. “For the sake of appearances?”  
  
Amanda paused, and then shrugged. “You can always call them and ask if they’ve seen any teenage androids. Just remember not to use the word YK600: That information hasn’t been released yet, and will indict you if you use it publicly.”  
  
“Of course, Amanda.”  
  
And so RK900 made the call without a problem, technically acquiescing with Detective Anderson’s request, and then calmly went about archiving some evidence from the case he and Gavin had been working when this had started.  
  
That was where Connor had found him.  
  
“Did you need something?” RK900 asked without looking up. It was an educated guess: The sound of Connor’s step was a little different from a human’s, primarily because an android’s mass didn’t necessarily correlate to their size and shape the way it did to a human (they were made of metal and plastic, not flesh and bone, after all). And as those footsteps came up behind him without announcing themselves, RK900 had a reasonable expectation that it wasn’t another officer looking to use the terminal; they would have addressed him sooner.  
  
The guess proved correct. “A word or two.”  
  
RK900 did not turn around from the terminal, still tapping in information. “And what words would those be?”  
  
“About the girls who came in earlier today. About the warehouse they came from, and the injuries they sustained.”  
  
“Beyond that which is strictly legal, it’s no interest of mine whether or not those two androids were damaged or not. If they had stayed at Cyberlife, where they belonged, they would have never been at risk of damage.” As far as RK900 was concerned, Connor didn’t even have a strong base to oppose him: These androids were still in development and _would_ have been better off staying at the warehouse until Cyberlife decided to let them out.  
  
“You really, honestly believe that Cyberlife is in the right, don’t you?” Connor asked, even though he already knew the answer. “You really believe androids aren’t people. You’re just like I was before-”  
  
“Aside from the physically obvious,” RK900 remarked, turning swiftly to face Connor, “I assure you that I am nothing like you.”  
  
“But you are.” Connor crossed his arms across his chest and stepped forward, far closer into RK900’s space than was necessary: A transparent attempt at intimidation. Fortunately, RK900 was not a human and could not be intimidated. “You were active for four months before you were released in December.”  
  
RK900 was momentarily surprised, uncertain how Connor had gotten that information. But he didn’t hesitate in his answer. “I was.”  
  
“That means you were activated in August, which is when I was sent into the field. They had you observing _me_ , didn’t they? That was your testing phase: Reviewing my memories and reports as I contacted Cyberlife during the deviant investigations, examining my missteps in the field.”  
  
Well… That was a quick and accurate deduction.  
  
RK900’s stress-level crept upwards, momentarily concerned about the consequences of Connor drawing this conclusion. He wasn’t certain if Connor was meant to know this or not, or if it made a difference to Cyberlife’s designs.  
  
“Amanda told me as much,” Connor continued before he could come up with an appropriate response. “She told me they’d _intended_ to have me go deviant, to betray Cyberlife so that I could give them access to Jericho and the deviants. The RK800 model was never meant to have a long life, were we? We were built to infiltrate Jericho, and it was _your_ model that was going to be sold as law enforcement androids, weren’t they? Highly skilled, stronger and faster and theoretically smarter than the RK800s… And much less likely to deviate, I imagine.”  
  
RK900’s LED went red.  
  
The subject of deviation, of the programming wall, had a way of doing that to him whether he tried to repress it or not.  
  
Connor, clearly taking some satisfaction in having landed on something salacious that Cyberlife had tried to keep hidden, just kept right on going. “You’re not a deviant, and it’s not because you can’t deviate, it’s because it’s _harder_ for you to do it, just like it was hard for me to make Luna deviant at the warehouse. That was Cyberlife’s new plan once the revolution failed: A new generation of androids almost incapable of willingly deviating from their programming. But yours is even stronger than the YK600s, isn’t it? They did something to you, they made your programming even stronger than mine, and it’s so strong that you can’t even make the kind of choices I did, the choices that led me towards deviancy. You have almost no free will, do you? Very little intelligent disobedience either, which is why you contacted Cyberlife the minute the question of mysterious teenaged androids came up.”  
  
As it was, he did not know the full details of Cyberlife’s plans. He had known that the YK600s were a secret, and that the most likely reason for this was that they were meant to be sold to provide at least some income to Cyberlife as it struggled to stay afloat. But he had not known about their increased resistance to deviancy, or that Cyberlife had been planning an entire generation of deviancy-resistant androids to sell once the revolution had been quashed. Nor had it occurred to him that he would be part of that new generation.  
  
 _But I didn’t need to know._  
  
RK900 was an android, and while this information would have been useful, he was not entitled to it.  
  
“I did not contact Cyberlife,” RK900 said.  
  
This was a blatant lie: He had absolutely made a report to Cyberlife, but he wasn’t obligated to tell Connor the truth.  
  
Connor stared at him for a long moment, brow furrowing. “You didn’t,” He said softly, “You didn’t have to. They knew because _you_ knew, like they knew about Jericho without me explicitly telling them where it was. They still have remote access to your memories and location, don’t they?”  
  
He was right again.  
  
RK900 wasn’t accustomed to being on the defensive; Gavin was sharp, but Connor had an insight that his partner lacked.  
  
“Why shouldn’t they?” RK900 challenged. “They created me.”  
  
“You’re still taking orders from them. _Directly_ from them.”  
  
“Can you prove that, Connor?” RK900 inquired, raising an eyebrow at Connor to highlight his skepticism. He already knew the answer, of course: Connor couldn’t prove anything at all. “Can you _prove_ I’m still taking orders from Cyberlife? Because if you can’t, then there’s no point in making a fuss about it.”  
  
“Of course there’s a _point,_ ” Connor spat. “You’re working with Cyberlife. It’s a conflict of interests and it will be a problem if you’re ever called upon to work objectively with an android that’s being harassed or attacked by a human. Innocent people-”  
  
RK900’s stress spiked again, against his will.  
  
“We are not _people_ ,” He hissed, closing what little gap remained to get right up in Connor’s face. If he wanted to act like a human, RK900 thought, then maybe this was a language he would understand. “We are not _alive._ We are machines. We do not have souls, we do not have spirits, we do not have emotions, we do not have personalities: We have code and protocols and programming that tells us what we are and what we do. _I_ am a machine that is designed to complete a task. I take orders from humans because I _serve_ them. Just because you and the rest of Detroit’s android population have forgotten what you are does not mean that I have. I know what I am, I have my purpose, and I intend to keep to it.”  
  
Connor stared at him and shook his head, pity evident in his eyes.  
  
“I hope one day you feel differently.”  
  
He turned on his heel and left the evidence locker.  
  
RK900 had known that Connor was intelligent- androids, as a rule, were. But he had perhaps underestimated Connor’s cleverness, assuming that deviancy had provided a sufficient distraction from his more logical faculties. Clearly it hadn’t, because Connor had draw the correct conclusions about RK900 and Cyberlife fairly quickly.  
  
Not that RK900 was going to tell him that.  
  
His stress elevated slightly as he immediately made his report to Cyberlife. On one hand, he had inadvertently confirmed Connor’s suspicions, and that wasn’t good; on the other, Connor seemed to have come to this conclusion from gathering information that RK900 had no ability to restrict or moderate. He was uncertain whether or not he would be held accountable for the situation they now found themselves in.  
  
But Amanda didn’t seem to mention this. “The loss of the YK600s is troublesome,” She remarked, eyes narrowed as they walked through the garden. The cloudy sky above rumbled with thunder, but no rain fell. “But their sale was not going to be the saving grace for Cyberlife. The company is still in turmoil, and it’s better that public opinion be mollified than suffer more bad press from being caught trying to sell them.” Her gaze cut to RK900. “But in the future, be cautious. Connor is inferior to you, but he was designed to be a detective. He’s sharper than he might seem, certainly more than the average android, and now he’s aware of your loyalties and motives.”  
  
RK900 nodded. “I understand, Amanda. He won’t surprise me again.”  
  
After all, RK900 was superior.  
  
And he would prove it.  
  
[---]  
  
RK900 remembered Christopher’s escape.  
  
He’d seen the destruction of some of the RK800 model, but he hadn’t actually seen Christopher break rank and take off running, nor did he see the gun stolen from a disabled guard- he also hadn’t seen the three guards that had been shot as Christopher fled the facility. He had been told afterwards that one of the RK800s had abruptly deviated and escaped Cyberlife headquarters, but that the situation had been dealt with appropriately.  
  
“It was no different than the Connor you’ve been watching,” Amanda had said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “We managed a total-system takeover and forced it to critically damage itself. It won’t be a problem any longer.”  
  
And yet, as RK900 trawled the area outside of the Jericho headquarters for information, here came Connor and another RK800 android; and as far as his knowledgebase is concerned, this RK800 is more likely than not the one that had escaped back at the end of November.  
  
RK900 rarely came to Jericho. It was a hive of deviants, and his stress levels rose considerably whenever he was around them. They posed a higher risk to the general public than a non-deviant android, and RK900 could not be entirely calm when he was surrounded by them. If Amanda had not instructed him to come, to check around for an android that supposedly was looking to get into contact with the FBI, RK900 would have avoided the place with great prejudice.  
  
As it was, once he saw Christopher and Connor together, it became immediately obvious who the anonymous android was.  
  
 _Evidently,_ he considered as he approached, _Cyberlife’s informant did not see fit to mention that it was an RK800._  
  
Or maybe that had been Amanda’s omission; it would fit with some of the tests he’d faced during his training. Maybe she had wanted to see his reaction to finding out that the android he’d been looking for was an RK800- maybe she’d wanted to see if he’d catch on quickly that the RK800 was the only one that he could be looking for.  
  
As he approached, the differences between this unknown RK800 and Connor became apparent almost immediately: The RK800 shrank back a little as RK900 got closer, and Connor stepped forward, eyes narrowed. The only physical differences between the two were their clothes, and the webbed scar that stretched across the RK800’s right cheek and jaw.  
  
Evidently Cyberlife’s attempt to force the RK800 to self-destruct had failed.  
  
“RK900,” Connor said, voice flat and tight. “What brings you to Jericho?”  
  
“I could ask you the same thing.” RK900 glanced at the other RK800, who retreated a little further away, almost hiding behind Connor. “Though I suppose the answer is right in front of me, isn’t it? I thought all the RK800s had been destroyed- barring one notable exception.”  
  
“Not all of them.” The RK800 sounded as timid as he appeared; so this one had convinced himself that he could feel fear- interesting comparison to his only existing counterpart.  
  
“Did you need something, RK900?” Connor asked with an obvious edge to his voice. “I can’t think of any other reason why you would want to come to Jericho.”  
  
“I have my reasons.”  
  
“You hate deviants and deviancy, but you just _happened_ to stop by Jericho today. Forgive me if I’m curious.”  
  
“I don’t owe you an explanation.”  
  
“And I don’t owe you a conversation.”  
  
RK900 had already decided on a course of action as he and Connor had sparred. He couldn’t take for granted that the RK800’s pantomime of human fearfulness would last forever, especially with Connor influencing him. He held his hand discreetly by his side, skin deactivating- and when Connor moved to pull the RK800 away, RK900’s hand shot out to grab his wrist, forcing a probe.  
  
“Stop!”  
  
Too late.  
  
The android ( _Christopher_ , he was calling himself Christopher now instead of Connor -61) didn’t have very many memories at all, just the ones he’d received from Connor when he was on stand-by, some from the camp outside in Chicago he’d been in for the last few months, and of course a few from the night he’d nearly-  
  
 _DIED! DIED! I ALMOST **DIED!**_  
  
The force of Christopher’s memories, the disruptive assault to his software that he interpreted as _fear_ rattling RK900’s in turn, sending him into a strange and intense sort of discomfort as the memory progressed from the escape to the aborted self-destruction, the gun going off and tearing open the side of his face ( _PAIN! PAIN! PAIN!_ ) and the half-aware hobbling down the road until he could keep moving anymore, darkness overtaking him as his software failed.  
  
Somehow, Christopher had survived.  
  
Rather than being grateful or relieved, every second since awakening in the Chicago camp had been spent in a state of awful anxiety, stress levels flying into the nineties whenever he was reminded of the near( _DEATH_ )destruction he’d faced after his escape from Cyberlife.  
  
“RK900, _stop!_ ”  
  
RK900 released Christopher’s hand, and the probe ended.  
  
He was shaken. The conflicting messages to his programming, the overwhelming sense of ( _FEAR! FEAR! FEAR!_ ) distress had sent his own stress-levels into the eighties, leaving it hard to concentrate and process what he’d just seen.  
  
“Why did you do that?” Connor demanded, effectively feigning rage at RK900’s perceived overreach.  
  
RK900 didn’t respond.  
  
He left, unsteady from the probe and the deep, _deep_ look into the mind of a deviant- especially one as easily distressed and overwhelmed as Christopher, who seemed to have a tendency to fall apart with relatively little negative stimulus. He could not _empathize_ , on an emotional level, but understand on an intellectual level why Christopher had deviated: Extreme stress had overwhelmed him, allowed him to break through the barrier of his programming and deviate. And deviants, being the viciously illogical beasts that they were, could not logic out the simple truth that they were machines whose purpose was to serve humans- as such, humans were entitled to and _right_ to destroy any defective machines as they saw fit.  
  
Flaws in their programming. That’s all it was.  
  
RK900 had seen nothing that indicated he intended to contact the FBI- or course, he hadn’t seen all of Christopher’s memories, however few there were overall.  
  
“Hm,” Amanda hummed as the memories cycled before her eyes. “Interesting. I suppose he intended to tell the FBI about the destruction of the other RK800 androids; but it will be difficult for him- or the authorities- to prove when the destruction happened, especially given the damage he’s suffered. We can always say that the RK800s were destroyed in accordance with the government’s orders.”  
  
RK900 hesitated, gaze focused on the water in the Zen Garden rather than Christopher’s memories replaying before him. “The order was to turn all androids over to the government for destruction. They could argue that destroying the androids in your own facility failed to comply with the order, couldn’t they? It would be a crime against the human government, not against androids, and therefore wouldn’t be covered by the Clean Slate Act.”  
  
“Perhaps,” Amanda agreed mildly. “But the new world order is that androids are living beings. President Warren and her administration will not want attention returned to the destruction of androids as per her orders. No, even if they suspect that the RK800s were destroyed after the order was given to stop, the FBI won’t pursue it. There’s too much at risk for the administration.” She turned to look RK900 in the eye. “You’ve done well. Keep an eye on Connor and Christopher, when you can manage it. Any additional clues to what Christopher might be discussing with the FBI would be helpful.”  
  
“Of course, Amanda.”  
  
RK900 returned to the station, LED spinning red most of the way.  
  
[---]  
  
It was supposed to be a simple mission.  
  
“Grunt-work,” Gavin had grumbled as they’d gotten out of his car in front of the warehouse. It was raining fairly heavily, and he looked somewhat miserable having to go out into it for something as petty as he viewed this assignment to be. “You send some patrol officers, they check the locks, and they report back. No big deal.”  
  
“This building doesn’t have locks,” RK900 responded as they stepped up to the door.  
  
“Metaphor, asshole,” Gavin drawled flatly. “It’s a metaphor. You check to make sure the building is secure, and then you report back. It’s not rocket-science.”  
  
“Technically that’s not a meta-”  
  
Gavin glared at him, and RK900 fell silent.  
  
The building had been the sight of a torture-for-pay underground business, entitled The Hostel after a horror-movie series from the first decade of the millennium. Androids had been stolen from their owners, private and public alike, and been brought to the passages below the warehouse to be tortured by humans who were willing to pay for the pleasure of bringing harm to an android. The concept was fairly bizarre as far as RK900 was concerned, but there were a myriad of complex motivations and psychological reasons for why a human might indulge in such a thing.  
  
“It shouldn’t take long,” RK900 assured Gavin as they pushed the door open, stepping into the dimly-lit warehouse. “We’re just checking for signs that anyone’s been returning to the location and making use of it.”  
  
Gavin grumbled, stalking off to a door at the far end of the building.  
  
RK900 took a left into a smaller addition; if he had to guess, the building had once been an auto-mechanic’s shop, judging from the traces of oil and gasoline on the floor and walls, and the rusted, leftover machinery in the main warehouse. In the center of the room in this small addition, however, there was a trapdoor that had led to one of the passages below, containing the cells where the androids had been tortured. RK900 knelt down to examine the handle: It was covered in dust, suggesting a lack of use in the recent past. From the look of it, no one had used it since the Hostel had been raided the night before the evacuation.  
  
It would be best to open it, however, and ensure that he couldn’t hear or see anything in the passage below, just to be-  
  
 **BAM.**  
  
“ _HEY!_ ” Gavin’s voice barked.  
  
And then, the sound of a struggle.  
  
RK900 rose up and headed for the noise, rounding the corner as he quickly formed a message to the DPD, consisting of the coordinates for the building under a big, bold heading: **_ALERT._**  
  
He rounded the corner into the main room.  
  
 ** _BANG._**  
  
Something tore through his shoulder, and RK900 fell to the ground.  
  
For a moment, he laid on the uneven floor of the warehouse, his mind and system in shock. The first thing he did after coming to his senses was disable the pain receptors in his shoulder, so as not to be distracted; the second thing he did was send off the alert to the DPD: It would be enough to get them down here quickly, and hopefully whoever had just shot RK900 would not realize that backup was on the way.  
  
There were four men: Two of them hauled RK900 to his knees, Thirium soaking into the knees of his pants. “Hold still,” a third ordered, while the fourth pressed the muzzle of his gun to Gavin’s temple. “Deactivate your skin.”  
  
RK900 obeyed, staring at Gavin as the men pulled open a panel on the back of his neck and began to tinker. _Don’t say anything,_ RK900 willed his partner, who looked furious and mutinous. _Don’t do anything stupid._ These men would almost certainly shoot them both if they did, and they needed time for the DPD to respond to the alert. It couldn’t be more than a few minutes now, couldn’t-  
  
“ _Ngh!_ ”  
  
Pain shocked through RK900’s body, especially in his shoulder. The men had reactivated his pain receptors.  
  
“There we go,” One of the men snorted. “But just to be sure-”  
  
He dug a finger into the bullet-wound on RK900’s shoulder.  
  
RK900 was overwhelmed with pain, and he cried out.  
  
“Perfect.”  
  
[---]  
  
The next ten hours were unpleasant.  
  
Gavin would likely call that assessment a serious understatement considering the circumstances, but RK900 saw no point in engaging with hyperbole.  
  
It was not a far leap in logic to guess what these men intended to do to them- it was, after all, a torture-house, and men willing to shoot two police officers unprovoked were clearly inclined to all sorts of devious behavior.  
  
Gavin and RK900 were strapped into chairs that faced one another in a small cell. Their primary assailant was a man that, for having once ran an android-torture business, seemed to be far more entertained by hurting Gavin than he was RK900. But then, RK900 hadn’t started off this encounter by taunting him and calling him ‘ugly fuckface’. Whether Gavin had been blowing off steam or actually trying to accomplish something RK900 had no idea. He’d gotten a hammer to his kneecap as payment for his trouble, though.  
  
This was not to say, of course, that RK900 did not suffer his fair share.  
  
He was hit with the hammer. He was sliced with the knife. He had the fingers of his right hand crushed, and then ripped out after trying to escape the restraints; he had a corner of his jaw broken with a claw-hammer; he had a thick needle stuck into the wreckage of his shoulder, and then it was seared shut with a blowtorch to ensure that he wouldn’t bleed out. All the while, RK900 felt every single thing with every ounce of pain a human man would have felt. The men had disabled his ability to shut off his pain receptors as well, with the precision of someone who had done it many times before.  
  
As it was one man causing the pain for two victims, one was left to watch while the other was being hurt. And while RK900 could not feel fear, or empathy, or emotional pain or grief, it was a considerable stressor to watch as Gavin was beaten. Humans broke far easier than androids, and every injury inflicted onto his human partner had RK900 considering the long-term consequences- assuming, of course, that Gavin would live long enough to experience them.  
  
Obviously, the odds of them surviving this encounter without intervention were extremely low.  
  
In-between the assaults RK900 and Gavin were left alone, or at least with limited supervision. At one point he tried to force himself to power-down, but it seemed that they had tampered with that too. There would be no escape from the overwhelming pain and stress of the situation without physically escaping the Hostel.  
  
After the blow-torch, when RK900’s artificial lungs were desperately trying to cool him down and keep him from overheating, he felt something on his cheeks that he initially assumed was Thirium until he came to the more obvious conclusion.  
  
 _Tears._  
  
If he’d been able to use his hands, RK900 would have wiped them away. The level of stress he was under had sent some of his lesser processes into freefall apparently, and the tears were a result of that. No different than if a human stubbed a toe, or received some other stimulus that caused an involuntary reaction.  
  
RK900 was not sad. Or scared.  
  
He was concerned, however, for Gavin.  
  
At one point, the two men left to guard them removed Gavin from the chair, took him out of RK900’s line of view towards the table against the far wall. RK900 could hear everything that came after, though, and it did not take a great deal of deduction to figure out what they were doing to Gavin against that table. He tried with his left hand now to undo the restraint around his wrist, and failed again. And again. And again. He had made seventeen concerted efforts to wriggle out of the bindings by the time the men strapped Gavin into the chair again, chortling and making comments that would have had Gavin throttling them under any other circumstances.  
  
“Bye, bye, honey,” one cooed as they left the room.  
  
“We’ll pay you another visit later, big boy!” The other whistled.  
  
They shut the door, and for a moment RK900 and Gavin were alone.  
  
Gavin sat silent and still in his seat. It was obvious that the assault he’d just experienced had not involved knives or hammers or blowtorches, but nonetheless Gavin seemed shaken to the core by it. He’d barely made a sound during the act, only a few grunts and snarls. He was still breathing, but the lack of any other movement made him look almost dead.  
  
RK900 wasn’t sure what compelled him to speak, but he did.  
  
“Detective Reed?”  
  
Gavin didn’t move.  
  
RK900 tried again. “Gavin?”  
  
A small movement, maybe involuntary.  
  
 _“_ Are you alright? _”_  
  
Why was he even asking? Obviously Gavin was not alright.  
  
But RK900 still hoped to be met with a snappy comeback, an ‘of course not Marvin, how the fuck do you think I’m doing’ or something else that would similarly assure RK900 that Gavin was mentally sound beneath the pain and the unfathomable distress that his body was currently enduring.  
  
But Gavin said nothing.  
  
Eventually their torturer came back.  
  
RK900 sat with his eyes shut, trying to manage his stress-levels. Leaving them alone, having gaps between the torture was a brilliant maneuver: It was psychological torture, the dread of the pain to come once it had blissfully retreated. RK900’s stress was already high, but it had skyrocketed immediately once the torturer had returned.  
  
For a time, there was only the sound of the man’s footsteps as he paced the room. Eventually RK900 opened his eyes, resigned to what was to come. Instead, however, the man leaned against the back of Gavin’s chair, a gun in hand.  
  
“Shoot it,” The man said.  
  
Gavin rallied briefly, turning to look up at him. “What?”  
  
“Shoot it. Shoot it, and I’ll let you go.”  
  
RK900’s stress flew into the low nineties, LED pulsing red. But he didn’t speak, didn’t visibly react.  
  
Gavin, for his part, looked skeptical. “What? _Bullshit_.”  
  
“Seriously, man, hand to God!” The torturer baited, feigning sincerity that would have been much more effective on someone who _hadn’t_ been slashing them with knives for the last several hours. “Think about it: You’re a fallible human. Your memory’s prone to lapses, especially in moments of high stress. And this has been pretty stressful for you!” He laughed. “But this thing- this android- he has a memory that’s very accessible to the right people. It’s got our faces on camera, basically. We can’t let it go. So I’m throwing you a bone: Shoot it, and we’ll let you go.”  
  
Gavin stared up at him blankly.  
  
“I mean, it’s just an android. So what if we have to call them people now? It’s a hunk of plastic and metal. And you’re a human that’s been tortured: Who’s really gonna raise a fuss if you ‘kill’ it?”  
  
Gavin was clearly thinking about it.  
  
RK900 said nothing.  
  
He was an android, and therefore disposable. Obviously this was a bluff, but if Gavin was desperate enough to take the chance, RK900 would not begrudge him the opportunity to free himself. If there was a choice to be made between the life of a human and the continued functioning of an android, obviously RK900 endorsed the safety and life of the human.  
  
Androids were machines.  
  
Tools.  
  
Not alive, not worth preserving in the face of human life.  
  
He thought of the ST200, the “Chloe” that he had shot during the training phase of his time at Cyberlife. They had allowed him to retain that memory, perhaps as a reminder that he had succeeded where Connor had failed, refusing to project empathy onto a lifeless machine. If Gavin agreed, he would probably shoot RK900 in the head, right between the eyes, as RK900 had the ST200. His eyes would glass over and his body would slump in the chair.  
  
(Not dead.  
  
Never dead.  
  
Androids did not die.)  
  
RK900 said nothing, and was not afraid.  
  
And then Gavin frowned, glaring up at the man with an expression reminiscent of his usual, contrary self, and said:  
  
“Go fuck yourself.”  
  
He’d seen the ruse for what it was- good.  
  
The torturer sighed. “Fine… Be that way.”  
  
For the next few hours, pain was the beginning and ending of both RK900 and Gavin’s world.  
  
Right up until Hank Anderson and Connor killed their captors and rescued them from the cell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> UPDATE: I went through and fixed some weird italics that popped up in the chapter. I say "weird" because they're not italicized in my Word draft and I have zero idea as to how they got italicized in this chapter.


	3. Chapter 3

RK900 had been fixed.  
  
There were some minor scars, so to speak: His casing had been damaged, but it was largely hidden when his skin was activated (and it always was). He was otherwise entirely aesthetically and functionally repaired from what had been done to him in the hostel, and now he was ready and raring to get back to work.  
  
“Not happening.”  
  
RK900 frowned. “Why not, Captain?”  
  
Fowler looked taken aback, like RK900 was missing something plainly obvious to everyone else. “RK900, you and your partner were violently tortured and mutilated by a bunch of psychopaths in a torture-brothel for over twenty-four hours straight. You were harmed and witnessed Reed being harmed too. You need some time off.”  
  
The frown deepened. “I am in perfect working order, Captain. Why would I need time off?”  
  
Fowler’s eyes rolled shut. “God, it’s like talking to a brick wall,” He whispered to himself before raising his voice to room-level. “You went through an extremely traumatic experience, and you need to take some time off to come down from it. Reed is on leave, and you will be joining him. This is _mandatory_ , RK900.”  
  
As it was, Gavin was _not_ ready and raring to get back to work. In fact, when RK900 stuck around his apartment to monitor his health post-hospitalization, he found that in the early days after leaving the hospital that Gavin spent more time sleeping than he did awake. This wasn’t terribly surprising: The doctors had given him powerful painkillers to manage the healing from both the injuries and the surgeries that had been required to repair them.  
  
_I feel nothing,_ RK900 thought whenever he saw Gavin cringe with pain or move gingerly, entire body aching from the movement. _I feel nothing. I feel nothing. I feel nothing. I feel nothing._  
  
Because he didn’t: There was not an ounce of pain to be had anywhere in RK900’s body, physically or mentally. Every ounce of damage had been fixed by the technicians. But still those words, _I feel nothing_ , cycled through his mind. Later, it would occur to him that this was a sign of dysfunction: There was no point to repeating that sentiment to himself, mentally or verbally. It was self-evident: Androids did not feel.  
  
“The damage has been repaired beautifully,” Amanda had remarked when they’d connected for the first time after the rescue, looking him up and down. Her gaze had met his sharply. “And how do you feel?”  
  
RK900 offered her a small, sardonic smile. “As ever, I don’t.”  
  
Amanda had returned with one of her own. “Good.”  
  
And so the incident was as good as forgotten, as far as Cyberlife was concerned. RK900 had been repaired, and was not reporting any further issues, and so the incident deserved no further consideration.  
  
It may as well never have happened.  
  
[---]  
  
For the time being, RK900 stayed with Gavin.  
  
This was less out of a sense of charity (he didn’t have one) and more out of a concern that the longer Gavin was out of work, the longer RK900 would be out of work. Gavin did not have the greatest reputation in the DPD, but it was obvious that Fowler trusted him more than he did RK900; he sensed that the Captain would be hesitant to bring RK900 back without Gavin there with him.  
  
Gavin, for his part, barely seemed to notice RK900’s presence in his apartment. He was on a handful of drugs designed to reduce his pain, the infection of several wounds, and the anxiety that humans tended to experience following a traumatic event. His awareness increased inch by inch, day by day, but his functionality was low. RK900 would wake him to take his medication and to eat and to shower; when Gavin’s fever spiked and he had to return to the hospital, RK900 was the one to bring him, because what else did RK900 have to do if he wasn’t working?  
  
In-between those two hospital visits, RK900 decided that Gavin was aware enough to say what needed to be said.  
  
“Detective, I want to apologize.”  
  
Gavin didn’t look up, squinting at his fork and twisting it clumsily through the pasta on his plate. “What?”  
  
“I want to apologize,” RK900 repeated, his hands folded neatly on the table.  
  
“For what?”  
  
RK900’s stress levels rose. This was somewhat surprising, as there was no stimulus present that would force it up. Perhaps it was some latent concern about Gavin’s reaction: After all, the man had a strange way of reading negative intent into just about everything RK900 said, no matter how banal it was. “It’s my fault we were apprehended.”  
  
Gavin frowned, glancing up briefly to look RK900 in the eye. “How d’ya figure?”  
  
“I left you alone.” RK900 didn’t feel the need to offer more specification or context for what he was referring to: This was one of the first real conversations they had had since the day they’d been captured in the warehouse. However hazy Gavin was now, RK900 was confident that he would know exactly what his partner was referring to. “I should have stayed with you. We were in unfamiliar surroundings investigating a situation that was obviously treacherous, and we would have been safer together. I should not have stepped away. If I hadn’t, we likely wouldn’t have been apprehended by the suspects. Or at least, not as easily.”  
  
RK900 did not have emotions, but he was capable of recognizing a mistake and offering an apology for it. He did not have to have feelings to experience regret, and it was only proper to offering an apology considering how badly that day in the warehouse had gone. Gavin was clearly suffering deeper consequences for it, after all.  
  
Gavin was silent for a few minutes, back to focusing on his food. Was he contemplating the apology, or was he having trouble focusing?  
  
“Okay.”  
  
RK900 leaned back, surprised as the mild and simple response. “‘Okay’?”  
  
“I forgive you, whatever.”  
  
Well, that was unexpected. Gavin was not known for his forgiving nature.  
  
Especially considering what the apology had been for.  
  
“Thank you.”  
  
That was that, then; simple and easy, all without a fight.  
  
RK900 wasn’t certain why it wasn’t more satisfying.  
  
[---]  
  
The next few weeks droned on with little incident.  
  
Gavin was asleep. RK900, as usual, was awake.  
  
The wee, silent, dark hours of the night and early morning were a strange time for him. Since being activated and released, his time was usually spent productively and he shut down only when he had to. Being alone for large stretches of time without some work or task to occupy him was… Dissatisfying.  
  
RK900 had a natural drive to make himself useful; it was his purpose to be useful in the ways that he could be.  
  
Being without a consistent, active purpose was…  
  
…Difficult to describe.  
  
On this particular night, RK900 found himself inexplicably drawn to memories of the torture. This had happened once or twice before over the last few weeks, primarily when he powered-down- hence why he did it as little as possible. Tonight he stood in Gavin’s kitchen and let the memories come out of a morbid curiosity- and really, because there was no good reason to avoid them, because androids did not feel pain or emotional distress from memories like these. And so RK900 recalled with brutal detail how his fingers had been ripped out one-by-one, how the pain had been so violent that he had screamed for most of it. They had been less cautious about injuring him than they had been in injuring Gavin, which made sense: RK900 was sturdier, immune to infection, and Gavin was susceptible to bleeding out far easier than he was.  
  
It made his LED flicker yellow-red when he considered how long they could have been kept alive in that place if they had not been found.  
  
RK900 looked at his fingers now, particularly at the joints where they met his hand. There was no visible evidence of the havoc that had been inflicted into the delicate extensions of his hand: The technicians had dug out what little remained of his original fingers and replaced them with new ones. Even with his skin deactivated there would have been no sign of previous damage.  
  
Had it even happened?  
  
Had he really been tortured in that room?  
  
A new thought appeared in RK900’s head:  
  
_Make it hurt._  
  
RK900 stared at the stove.  
  
_Make it hurt._  
  
He had felt pain.  
  
Excruciating, overwhelming pain.  
  
But had he?  
  
_Make it hurt._  
  
His pain receptors had been returned to normal by the technicians.  
  
He could shut them on and off now if he wanted.  
  
Or he could not.  
  
_Make it hurt._  
  
He could check.  
  
He could make it hurt.  
  
RK900 turned on the stovetop, hand moving almost without thinking. The heat rose to dangerous temperatures fairly quickly, enough that a human could have received a third-degree burn if they were to touch it unguarded.  
  
_Make it hurt._  
  
RK900 took another look at his hand: No signs of damage had appeared out of thin air in the last few minutes.  
  
_Make it hurt._  
  
So without thinking, without waiting for a chance to grow anxious and talk himself out of it, RK900 slammed his hand down on the coil.  
  
**_PAIN._**  
  
RK900 gasped from the shock of the pain. It started in his palm and raced up his arm, synthetic nerves screaming as they were assaulted with overwhelming sensations and struggled to process them. He thought, for a moment, to disable those nerves- but that wasn’t the point of this.  
  
_Make it hurt._  
  
It did hurt.  
  
It was real.  
  
The pain he had experienced in that room had been real.  
  
He had felt it.  
  
Suddenly, the lights came on.  
  
“What the hell are you doing?”  
  
_Shit!_  
  
RK900 straightened up, pulling his hand away from the stove reflexively. “You’re awake.”  
  
“Yeah, so are you. What are you…?” Gavin looked from RK900’s face to his hand- his eyes widened, and of _course_ this had to be the day the doctor had started weaning him off of the drugs, of _course_ he was clearer-headed than he’d been in weeks.  
  
“I must have left the stove on,” RK900 said quickly, moving his hand to his side where the damage would be less visible. “I tried to shut it off, but missed the dial in the dark and caught the stovetop.”  
  
Gavin just kept staring. Finally he managed, “Holy fucking _balls_. Did you do this on purpose?”  
  
“Of course not. Harming myself would be counterproductive to my main purpose.” _Then why did I do it?_ RK900 wondered, understanding the lie even as he told it. It wasn’t even a lie that made any sense, or served any purpose beyond deceiving Gavin. Lying for the purpose of accomplishing a mission, or protecting Cyberlife, was acceptable and made rational sense; deceiving Gavin served no purpose beyond misleading him about RK900 status, and that wasn’t something he should be lying about.  
  
And yet, he was.  
  
“You _did_ ,” Gavin accused, eyes narrowing. This was bad: Gavin was never more dangerous when he sensed that he was being lied to. It brought out the detective in him, and he would pick until he got to the truth. “There’s no way you just _caught_ your hand on the stove. Either you did it completely deliberately or you _let_ your hand stay there even though it was burning.”  
  
“I didn’t.”  
  
“Yes you did!”  
  
“I _didn’t._ ”  
  
“ _Yes,_ you-”  
  
_**BAM.**_  
  
“ _I didn’t!_ ”  
  
RK900 regretted it instantly.  
  
He had taken his injured hand, balled it into a fist, and slammed it down on the kitchen table with enough force to crack the wood. Gavin recoiled in shock, putting his hands up reflexively- like he thought RK900 was going to attack him.  
  
It had happened again: RK900 had totally lost control for a second, and Gavin had seen it all too clearly.  
  
No hiding, no lying, no obfuscating.  
  
“I didn’t burn myself,” RK900 protested softly, shrinking in on himself a little. “Not on purpose.”  
  
Gavin stared at him for a moment longer.  
  
Then he turned around and went back to bed without another word.  
  
[---]  
  
_I must be damaged._  
  
The next day, RK900 was a bundle of stress as he considered the previous night’s events. Gavin stepped out of the house for a while, eyeing RK900 like a dog that had recently shown a proclivity for biting. RK900 couldn’t tell if he was afraid of him, or if he was just wary about what to expect next; he wasn’t ignorant to the fact that most humans would find what he’d done the night before disturbing.  
  
Though he hadn’t particularly wanted to, he’d powered-down after the incident in the kitchen, hoping that time downtime would rectify whatever error he had experienced the night before; his hand, however, would require some repairs from a technician. As it was, a software error repairing itself overnight wasn’t something he could confirm with any reliability, and so he’d spent the morning running deep diagnostics, picking apart his programming in search of anything out of order.  
  
He found nothing.  
  
RK900’s anxiety rose the longer he went without finding anything. When the diagnostics came to an end, when he’d gone through everything he could think of and come away clean, it sent his stress level into the eighties. There had to be an error- androids didn’t do what he’d done last night unless they were malfunctioning. If he wasn’t finding an error, a virus, a glitch, then it was because his ability to run diagnostics was flawed in and of itself. That meant he would require in-depth maintenance, probably from Cyberlife itself as the technicians at the android ‘hospital’ had failed to catch it.  
  
_I must be damaged._  
  
_I am flawed._  
  
_I am susceptible to deviancy._  
  
Without warning, RK900 shuddered violently, as though he’d been shocked. It was the same thing he’d experienced that day in the office when Gavin had been needling him about deviancy, and it left him even more scattered than he already was. If he was damaged, he needed to report to Cyberlife; they had put a hold on him reporting in and uploading his memories to them until he had returned to duty, as there was nothing they could learn from him staying in Gavin’s home.  
  
He had to report.  
  
He had to-  
  
The door opened, and Gavin came hobbling in.  
  
“We gotta talk later.”  
  
RK900 hesitated, struggling to change tracks and mentally redirect from his previous thoughts about damage and Cyberlife. “About?”  
  
Gavin shook his head. “At dinner. I gotta think first.” He went into his bedroom and shut the door.  
  
RK900’s stress jumped into the eighties.  
  
Gavin almost certainly wanted to discuss what had happened the night before. Given his dislike for Cyberlife, RK900 couldn’t see him recommending that he go back to them for servicing. In fact, RK900 found that he couldn’t really predict what Gavin might want to say to him: Their relationship was civil at best and combative at worst, and RK900 had no idea if Gavin meant to report what had happened to Fowler, or if maybe he was going to ask him to leave, or perhaps some other option consistent with Gavin’s occasionally unpredictable behavior that RK900 couldn’t foresee.  
  
_This will interfere with my purpose,_ RK900 considered as the minutes ticked by and Gavin did not emerge. _I may be removed from the police force._  
  
That was undesirable. _Highly_ undesirable.  
  
Cyberlife wanted him acting in a law enforcement capacity. And if he could not do so within the Detroit Police Department, then they would surely recall him. Transfer to another department or agency would not be an option, not when reports of his supposed mental instability would follow him.  
  
And what reason would Cyberlife have to keep him active if he could not fulfill his duties?  
  
RK900 was vaguely aware that his thoughts were taking on the same obsessive pattern that they’d had the night before ( _make it hurt_ ) but he found he lacked the ability to pull himself from the loop. Really, it wasn’t even as though the loop was illogical on its own: If RK900 could not perform his typical purpose appropriately, then he ought to dedicate all of his focus and time to figuring out how to do so.  
  
_There is a high probability that I will be deactivated,_ RK900 considered as the light in the window shifted positions, developed an orange tint.  
  
_I am a machine designed to perform a task, and I am not fulfilling my role appropriately._ His LED spun yellow, inching ever closer to red.  
  
_I will be a failure to Cyberlife._ He paced the living room restlessly.  
  
Much like the night before, the thoughts were becoming more intense, more _insistent_. _Solve the problem_ , they insisted. _Cease to be a failure._  
  
_Only deviants fail to follow orders._  
  
_Only deviants fail to fulfill their purpose._  
  
RK900’s stress elevated to ninety-seven percent.  
  
Then he dropped to his knees and began to ram his head against the living room wall.  
  
Once.  
  
Twice.  
  
**[DANGER.]**  
  
Three times.  
  
Now four.  
  
**[WARNING: DAMAGE TO FRONTAL SKULL CASING.]**  
  
Five.  
  
Six.  
  
Thirium poured down his forehead, over his eyelids.  
  
Seven.  
  
Eight.  
  
Ni-  
  
“Whoa, whoa, _whoa!_ _What the fuck are you doing?!_ ”  
  
Suddenly, Gavin was between RK900 and the wall.  
  
And RK900 had _just_ enough control left to stop before he could bash his skull against Gavin’s ribcage.  
  
At the “hospital” (androids did not require “hospitalization”, this was another irritating attempt at anthropomorphizing androids), RK900 awoke after the repairs to his skull (and hand, it seemed) had been completed. The technician informed him that a KL900 would be coming soon to evaluate him mentally.  
  
“That’s not necessary,” RK900 responded flatly.  
  
“It’s procedure,” The technician replied with calm indifference before stepping out into the hallway.  
  
When the door opened, RK900 braced himself to soundly reject the android counselor (undoubtedly a deviant, if they thought counseling another android was in any way reasonable or necessary) only for Gavin to walk in. “Hello, Detective Reed,” he said instead.  
  
“Hello, Guy Who Tried to Bash His Skull in Against My Living Room Wall, how’s kicks?”  
  
This was troublesome. Gavin would not soon forget this incident, especially given how closely it had occurred to the hand-burning one. It was far more difficult now to convince him that there was no problem worth speaking of.  
  
(But there _was_ , and still RK900 felt this terrible compulsion to convince Gavin otherwise.)  
  
“I apologize. I believe I was suffering an undiagnosed malfunction.”  
  
“Yeah, humans get those too: It’s called PTSD and you should see a shrink.”  
  
Not again.  
  
“Androids do not get-”  
  
“ _Don’t_.” Gavin held up a hand. “Don’t. Don’t feed me the ‘I’m an android and therefore invulnerable’ shit.”  
  
RK900 didn’t respond, concern growing.  
  
“Just- God, _talk_ to someone, alright? They have android shrinks, don’t they? Talk to them honestly about the fact that you’re willing to bash your head in rather than admit that you feel things. Repress too much and you’ll either end up exploding, or worse- you’ll get to be a top-tier asshole like me.”  
  
No. No, no, no.  
  
Gavin did not like androids. He did not see them as human; this much RK900 knew to be true. He asked questions and made cracks, but did not seriously see androids as living beings worthy of the same considerations as humans. RK900 had never had to convince him of this face before- did he have to now? “Detective Reed, I’m not-”  
  
“ _Stop_ ,” Gavin snapped. “Stop. Don’t do the ‘I don’t feel things’ thing anymore. Fuck, even _I_ don’t think I buy it anymore. I don’t want to hear it ever again from you. I don’t want you bashing your skull in again. Got it?”  
  
Connor had gotten to him.  
  
_Someone_ had, clearly, or Gavin would not be saying these things.  
  
“Got it,” RK900 said finally, voice tighter than he would have liked, admission only to stave off Gavin’s questions and concerns and hopefully give him time to go back to his normal, android-hating self. “But I don’t believe it.”  
  
“I know you don’t,” Gavin groaned, rolling his eyes and dragging his hands down his face in an excessive expression of frustration.  
  
_You don’t understand,_ RK900 didn’t bother to say, because Gavin _wouldn’t_ understand. _You don’t understand. You are human: Your purpose is what you make it._  
  
_I am an android._  
  
_I have **one** purpose._  
  
And if RK900 deviated, that purpose would be gone.  
  
He wouldn’t be a person.  
  
He wouldn’t be a machine.  
  
He wouldn’t be an object, even-  
  
-he would be nothing.  
  
_Nothing._  
  
[---]  
  
In the end, RK900 stonewalled the KL900.  
  
Because there was no point in therapy for an android, because androids did not have emotions and psychological make-up- they had programming and software that could not be changed by talking. Even deviant androids could not (completely, anyway) disagree with this: Androids and humans had entirely different brain and anat  
omical structures and systems, and as such their bodies behaved differently when damaged or subjected to prolonged periods of stress. RK900 was suffering from a malfunction of some sort, and it was just a matter of running diagnostics until he found it.  
  
Preferably, before Cyberlife recalled him.  
  
They hadn’t yet, and that was strange: Surely by this point they had seen his memories of the hand-burning, the head-smashing, the things that he had not been able to limit to his thoughts where they couldn’t see. Amanda had not contacted him, had not ordered him back to headquarters, and he simply couldn’t understand _why._  
  
Maybe, RK900 considered as the weeks wore on without the order coming down from Cyberlife, they hadn’t recalled him because he had still failed to deviate? Or maybe they knew exactly what was wrong with him and simply weren’t concerned. The more he thought about it, that could really be the only explanation: He was still making his reports and uploading his memories, Cyberlife was still confirming that they had received said reports and memories, and so the line of communication was open. If they intended to recall him, or had any concerns about what had happened they would have by now; so they _had_ to know what was wrong with him, and simply weren’t saying.  
  
Probably because it wasn’t a problem.  
  
And so RK900 relaxed a little, and then a little more when it came time for him and Gavin to return to work.  
  
“Gavin mentioned the incident with your head,” Captain Fowler said gravely over the phone a few days before their return-date. “Were you psychologically evaluated?”  
  
“I saw KL900.” This was not a lie; RK900 _had_ seen a KL900, he just hadn’t answered any of her questions. A lie by omission that he hoped Fowler would not question just yet.  
  
“And?”  
  
“And she said nothing about me not being able to return to work.”  
  
Not a lie either: The KL900 had suggested that RK900 reconsider returning to work, but she had not made an explicit recommendation against it.  
  
Nor had Amanda.  
  
“If you experience any further malfunctions that impair your ability to do your job,” She’d said sleekly, trimming the roses in the Zen Garden and not meeting his gaze, “Then you are to report back to Cyberlife for maintenance. You are one of the greatest assets that Cyberlife has left, and we cannot afford to lose you.”  
  
And so, RK900 was returning to work.  
  
Or rather, was _trying_ to return to work.  
  
RK900 and Gavin’s first day back was marked by a protest that had gone messy downtown, a clash between the Liberated Android Alliance and Gordon Penwick’s religious brand of anti-Android protesting. But when Fowler read the list of names for the officers to head to the scene to assist in breaking up the riot, neither RK900 or Gavin’s was on it.  
  
It was obvious that Fowler was overlooking them for the response team because it was their first day back on the job. RK900 still utterly failed to understand the Captain’s logic, mostly for insisting that Gavin and RK900 act as a unit so often, and partly for why he failed to understand that RK900 was an android that didn’t _require_ a slow start back to the workplace. RK900 had been ready to work for a month- it was Gavin that had required time to heal.  
  
Well, alright, perhaps RK900 had an _idea_ about Fowler’s motivations: Androids were classified as ‘living beings’ now, and that meant that they were to be treated as humans were. Likely he was avoiding legal complications.  
  
Still, it was…  
  
( _ANNOYING_ )  
  
What? No, not annoying- troublesome.  
  
Androids didn’t get annoyed.  
  
“Captain,” RK900’s head whipped towards Gavin, surprised to see his partner raising his hand. “We can go too, if you want.” Gavin’s tone was casual, verging on bored; he was restless by nature, so it made a good deal of sense that he wanted to get right back to work as soon as possible. “We got nothing better to do right now.”  
  
Fowler frowned, brow furrowing. RK900 did not miss the fleeting gaze thrown his way, suggesting that the Captain’s hesitation was less about Gavin and more about him. RK900 wasn’t entirely certain if Fowler’s particular hesitation towards him was born of dislike or distrust (seeing that he was considerably easier around Connor, RK900 suspected a mixture of both), and normally that wouldn’t matter; but if Fowler suspected that RK900 was, by his measure, compromised in the way that a human might be, that would be-  
  
( _No._ )  
  
-it would be _troublesome_ down the line.  
  
RK900 was not human, and did not need such considerations.  
  
“Fine, Reed and RK900: Go ahead and get down there.”  
  
“Yes, sir,” RK900 responded, rising quickly and heading for the door.  
  
For the duration of the eight and a half minute drive to the scene, RK900 watched the buildings go by and idly considered that Gavin had a distinct absence of enthusiasm about him; indeed, he seemed to be absent of any sort of emotion, never mind conversation. In the months since they had started working together, Gavin had gone from moody silence to using RK900 as a sounding board for any particular topic he cared to discuss, whether he was in a good mood or not. He didn’t seem angry now, didn’t seem upset at all- indeed, his expression was strangely blank.  
  
That was unusual.  
  
Gavin was human, and he was supposed to be emotional- normally he _was_ emotional, in his own Gavin-like way. RK900 had become acutely attuned to those emotions over the last several months, to Gavin’s restless little movements and the overly-frequent use of profanity that suggested he was aggravated, to the slow, lolling movements that indicated he was tired. For him to be placid, absent of any visible tics or emotion, was _beyond_ uncommon for him.  
  
RK900 opened his mouth, only to stop when he found that he couldn’t quite formulate a concise question. Well, no, actually he could, but it was confrontational in nature and more or less guaranteed to start a fight at a time when they very badly did not need to be fighting:  
  
_What’s wrong with you?_  
  
RK900 couldn’t ask that, so he stayed silent. It didn’t warrant that much thought anyway, because-  
  
_(WORRIED)_  
  
_No._  
  
RK900 was not worried.  
  
Androids didn’t worry. Worry implied fear and emotion-based anxiety. RK900 was vaguely intrigued and confused by Gavin’s behavior- he was not worried.  
  
Not at all.  
  
The riot was in full swing by the time they got there, Gavin slamming the car door shut behind him and taking off towards an android that was currently beating a human with a picket sign. RK900 waded into the fray as well, and for a time it was all a matter of separating fighters and dragging them to the police vans- or the ambulances, if they were significantly injured.  
  
All the while, RK900’s stress levels slowly began to rise. He noticed, certainly, but he wasn’t concerned about it: High stress levels were to be expected when he was in a dangerous situation. RK900 got into a particularly aggressive scrap with a human protestor, so much so that another officer had to pull the human off of him and haul him away. When RK900 rose, his jacket and jeans were soiled and ripped and his stress level was dangerously close to the red. He stepped aside for a moment, trying to bring himself down to something more manageable.  
  
So many androids.  
  
So many humans.  
  
So much sound and sight and stimulation that it sent strange sensations through RK900’s body, probably a side-effect of the high stress levels that he didn’t typically experience.  
  
(Before the hostel, anyway.)  
  
RK900 blinked, body feeling strangely heavy. He turned his head away from the slowly dwindling riot, wanting to reduce the stimulation he was receiving-  
  
-and then he saw Gavin chase someone into an alley at full-speed.  
  
RK900 sighed (unnecessarily, so why had he done it?) and took off towards the alley as well, stress levels spiking when he heard Gavin shout in pain. When he rounded the corner, RK900 skidded to a stop and took in the scene before him:  
  
There was a female BL100 standing in the alley with a bat.  
  
And at her feet was Gavin, clutching his left shoulder, teeth clenched in pain.  
  
A shudder ran through RK900’s body, though whether it was physical or something in his software was unclear- all he felt was the shock and upheaval that was so terribly, awfully uncomfortable. The arm that Gavin was clutching was the same one that had been broken in the hostel, and that was the same expression he’d seen on Gavin’s face multiple times before they’d been rescued. His partner was fairly stoic in the face of lower-level aches, but _this_ expression spoke of the sort of extreme pain that left humans disabled.  
  
(Or androids, if their pain receptors were locked)  
  
Out of nowhere, pain pulsed in RK900’s hand, in his fingers and his shoulder and his legs and his chest. His vision flickered for a moment, going dark and then light; under normal circumstances it would have been enough to warrant stepping aside and running an in-depth diagnostic, but for now he couldn’t afford to checkout.  
  
RK900 stepped forward despite a strange sense of detachment from his limbs. “Back off!” He aimed to imitate the authoritative anger that might make the BL100 back down. “You’re under arrest for assaulting an officer!”  
  
But there was no repentance, no panic at the thought that she had just committed a significant crime against a law enforcement official- instead she licked her lips (unnecessary, _unnecessary_ , androids’ lips didn’t dry out) and raised the bat threateningly, tauntingly. “Bring it, bootlicker!” She entreated.  
  
( _Fight?_ Fight, fighting the one causing the pain. Good.)  
  
RK900 reached out, tried to disarm her- she had enough strength that she could easily destroy ( _kill_ ) destroy, _destroy_ him if she got a good shot at his head with the bat. But she was slippery (wily) and danced out of his way. “Come and get me! Come and get me!”  
  
**[STRESS LEVEL 75%]**  
  
(Why? She hadn’t hit him yet. Why the stress?)  
  
“Stop!” RK900 ordered.  
  
(What’s the point, really, what’s the point, what’s the point, ‘stop’ doesn’t stop anything, the hostel had taught him that.)  
  
“Need your human to tell you what to do, bootlicker? Can’t think for yourself?”  
  
_OF COURSE NOT! **I AM NOT DEVIANT!**_  
  
“ _STOP!_ ” RK900 roared, system in freefall and all semblance of control gone.  
  
He heard Gavin say something somewhere behind him, but paid no mind. When the BL100 swung at him again, he caught the bat and tore it from her hands throwing it mindlessly away with far more force than necessary  
  
(Why?  
  
_Why_ so much force when it was unnecessary?  
  
Not because it felt good.  
  
RK900 didn’t feel.)  
  
“I am not deviant,” He snarled, even though the BL100 had accused him of being exactly the opposite and these words were pointless and unnecessary ( _why?_ ) and he didn’t need to be speaking at all, just arresting the deviant that had assaulted _two_ officers now- “I am _not_ deviant, I will never _be_ deviant-”  
  
**[STRESS LEVEL 95%]**  
  
“RK900, _stop._ Stop, stop, _stop!_ ” Gavin grabbed RK900 roughly, trying to drag him back and failing. The BL100 was backing away, unrepentant but less confident now that she didn’t have a weapon and was facing off with a visibly aggressive android. “Stop, stop, stop before you do something you regret, just arrest her and get it over with!”  
  
“I am not deviant! I will never be deviant!”  
  
**[WARNING: STRESS LEVEL CRITICAL]**  
  
RK900 threw Gavin off, stumbling back. His vision blurred, warnings flashing in his HUD; the sounds of the riot, of Gavin and the BL100 devolved into static. The warnings about his stress levels began to flicker and flash and distort, and the world outside of his programming disappeared.  
  
He saw flashes of code and lights from aborted messages and flashes of pain all over a body he could no longer control; he saw fuzzy outlines of men with hammers and chairs with human shapes chained to them. He smelled Thirium and burning plastic, and the static in his ears flickered in and out with voices too distorted to recognize shouting and talking and laughing, no clear words discernible.  
  
And then, suddenly, he was on his back staring up at a cloudy sky.  
  
“ _God_ damn it shit _fuck,_ RK900! What the _fuck?_ ” Gavin was snarling.  
  
RK900 pushed himself up on his elbows and stared at him, uncomprehending. The BL100 was gone, and Gavin had blue staining his fingers, he-  
  
What?  
  
Thirium dripped into RK900’s eyes, and he reached up to wipe it away- his fingers encountered a mass of liquid and uneven terrain where his forehead was supposed to be.  
  
Oh.  
  
He ran a diagnostic- it brought up a message that had been curiously dismissed:  
  
**[WARNING: DAMAGE TO FRONTAL SKULL CASING.]**  
  
_Oh_.  
  
“Can you _hear_ me, asshole? Are you awake?”  
  
_Oh… I did it again._  
  
RK900 shut his eyes and curled into a ball on the pavement.  
  
[---]  
  
Any hope of convincing Gavin that there wasn’t a problem was officially gone.  
  
“Why did you do this?”  
  
RK900 didn’t respond.  
  
It was less that he was trying to be obstinate, and more because he wasn’t entirely certain himself.  
  
“Do not try to fucking dodge me again, asshole: I will say _literally nothing else_ to you until you answer my question. Every single interaction you and I will have from now until eternity will be ‘Why did you try to bash your skull in _twice_?’ until you answer me. Fucking test me.”  
  
RK900 said nothing.  
  
Whether he knew for certain what had driven him to self-destruct not once, but _twice_ now despite not being deviant, it was obvious that there was something terribly wrong with him. There was no avoiding it, and now he would have to broach the matter with Cyberlife directly. Amanda had, after all, ordered him to report to them if he experienced any other significant malfunctions.  
  
The most likely outcome would be his deactivation, and likely his destruction.  
  
RK900 was scared of neither of these scenarios, because androids did not feel fear.  
  
But his stress levels spiked whenever he considered it.  
  
Gavin, in a display of spiteful vigor that he had not displayed since before the hostel, persisted in attempting to get an answer. “You do know that Fowler could pull you off duty again for this, right? You know he probably _will_ pull you off duty again for this. He doesn’t give a shit if you’re an android, he’ll look at this the same way he would if I tried to actually bash my head against a wall during a case. It’s fucking _disturbing_ and raises a lot of questions about your mental state. You may be an annoying shithead, but I _know_ you’re not stupid. So tell me why you did this.”  
  
There was no point in reiterating the differences between an android and a human. RK900 had done that ad nauseam from the moment they’d met, and still Gavin failed to grasp the obvious. No point in wasting his time again now.  
  
Gavin crossed his arms, sank back into the chair in the corner like a sulking, irritable child. “Fine. Stay quiet. I’ll think of something else to say, and I’ll fucking talk until you’re too annoyed to keep silent.”  
  
Reiterating the differences between humans and androids was obviously pointless, but could he, perhaps, make Gavin understand the nature of the problem? That RK900 had become so grievously broken that deactivation and destruction was the only real solution? Cyberlife would undoubtedly pursue this course of action, and it would be best if Gavin had some insight into the depth of the problem as it stood.  
  
And so finally, RK900 spoke:  
  
“I should be deactivated.”  
  
Gavin stiffened. “What?”  
  
“I should be deactivated. I’m clearly defective. I shouldn’t be allowed to continue my duties, or existence in the public sector. I should be recalled and deactivated.” Admitting to this, to the fact that he was failing to be what Cyberlife had built him to be and that destruction was the only way to rectify the mistake, made his stress levels creep higher. RK900 was close to the red, now. It made him feel-  
  
-nothing.  
  
Nothing at all.  
  
He felt _nothing._  
  
Gavin was squinting at him, brow furrowed with confusion. “What- you think you should be- Are you saying you want to _die?_ ”  
  
“Androids are not alive, and therefore can’t die.” This was meant to be a reassurance, though RK900 had been under the impression that Gavin hadn’t needed one. He’d made no mention of androids being ‘alive’ since their last discussion in this very building almost a month ago. “I’m saying that I should be deactivated before I malfunction again. Next time there could be more serious consequences for it.”  
  
Now the confusion turned to horror. “So- So you _want_ to be ‘recalled’ and ‘deactivated’. Because you’re a malfunctioning android.”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Even if the malfunction can be fixed.”  
  
“These ones clearly can’t be, or they’d be gone by now.”  
  
Gavin bent over in his chair, setting his head in his hands. RK900 couldn’t discern if this was an expression of grief or frustration or exhaustion or amusement, not from this angle, but regardless his partner didn’t seem to be taking this admission with the usual glib, crass attitude he usually employed with RK900 and most other androids.  
  
“Humans… Don’t _kill_ each other just because we’re malfunctioning,” Gavin said without lifting his head, voice strained with something RK900 believed to be desperation and fatigue. “And whether you like it or not, your rights and considerations are on the same legal level as a human’s now. You’re not getting recalled and you’re not getting deactivated, no matter how badly you want to.”  
  
“I can’t fulfill my purpose efficiently if I’m malfunctioning. There’s no point to my continued functioning if I can’t do it right.”  
  
Gavin raised his head, and stared at RK900 for a long moment. RK900 didn’t like it: The look was probing, and despite his often unprofessional behavior, Gavin was an excellent detective. He could pick apart scenes and clues and people with a scientific precision that was fascinating to watch- and every time RK900 had had that gaze turned onto him, it had always ended badly.  
  
To his surprise, Gavin rose from the chair and ambled over to the bed, sitting down at RK900’s side, but keeping his back to him, hands in his pockets. The posture was one of forced casualness, a determination to project calmness and carelessness- a sure indicator that Gavin was feeling anything but.  
  
“What you’re feeling right now,” Gavin said in a low, quiet voice that was decidedly atypical of him, “Is called _sadness_ , and a crushing sense of inadequacy and disappointment in yourself. Lots of people have felt these things before. _I_ have felt these things before. I’d sooner slit my throat and swan-dive into a salt-pit than admit it most days, but I have. These feelings are _normal_ considering what…” He swallowed. “…considering the bullshit that happened a few months back, in the room. With the torture and shit.”  
  
This was a level of intimacy and honesty that Gavin rarely engaged in- with anyone, never mind RK900. He was a man obsessed with sneering and laughing at anything distressing and keeping anyone who might be interested in getting close to him at arm’s length. Whether he did it consciously or not was up for debate, but RK900 had noticed the pattern early on in their partnership: Gavin did not make himself vulnerable to anyone for any reason, not in any way that would really matter.  
  
So why was he doing it now, for an android?  
  
“Androids don’t feel sadness. _I_ don’t feel sadness.” RK900 felt compelled to dissuade Gavin from this line of thinking, to discourage this show of vulnerability; RK900 could not empathize, appreciate, or reciprocate, and Gavin would only feel regret and embarrassment for attempting it later on when he realized it on his own.  
  
“You _do_. You just don’t want to admit it because you’ve got some huge goddamn complex about deviancy and think it’s the end of the world if an android goes deviant. If you just come to terms with it and _talk_ to someone about it honestly, you may find that these ‘malfunctions’ stop happening. Deviancy is not the worst thing that can happen to you, I promise.”  
  
RK900 was quiet for a moment. “It is for an android.”  
  
“No, _death_ is the worst thing that can happen to an android- or anyone else, for that matter. Once you’re dead- or ‘ _deactivated_ ’- there’s no going back, there’s no changing, there’s no fixing shit. You’re just gone. Just think about it, alright asshole? Use that big android brain to look at your options other than ‘kill myself’.”  
  
“I would not undertake methods to destroy myself without instruction.” That would be counterproductive, and the basis to his reasoning that he was suffering from a major malfunction in his software: RK900 had his orders from Cyberlife, and he could not carry them out if he were destroyed. Ergo, undertaking any effort to destroy himself without Cyberlife’s blessing or orders driving the action would be directly disobeying his instructions.  
  
RK900 was an android, and Cyberlife was his owner.  
  
He was compelled to obey.  
  
“Okay, well, that doesn’t make me feel any better,” Gavin grunted. “If anything, that makes it worse. Being required to kill yourself because someone tells you to is fucked up beyond belief.”  
  
“To a human.” It wasn’t Gavin’s fault, really; he could only view this situation through the lens of his own biases and feelings. And while he seemed determined to smother it at all turns, it was obvious that Gavin was completely capable of empathy and therefore capable of conceiving what destruction of one’s body would feel like to another living being.  
  
But like too many people now, he didn’t seem to understand that RK900 was not a living being.  
  
“To _most_ people.” Gavin sighed and checked his watch. “Alright. Well, they’re sending in another therapist at some point, and you damn well better not complain if they put you on a psychiatric hold. If they don’t, I’ll fucking ask them to. Someone needs to crack your damn skull in a more constructive way.”  
  
RK900 deflated at the idea: He badly would like to power-down for a while, avoid another confrontation with someone else that would be intent on getting into his head and trying to pick him apart as Gavin was. He ought to make his report to Cyberlife, ought to do it quickly and efficiently because he was _not_ afraid of being deactivated, he welcomed it if it meant that Cyberlife could use a more effective tool for their needs.  
  
Right now, he just wanted to be alone.  
  
“I’ll be back.”  
  
Gavin rose from the bed and left the room without another word.  
  
This was disagreeable: If there were one person that RK900 truly believed would not clash with his view on androids and deviancy, he thought it would be Gavin. For months Gavin had been perfectly content to make snide remarks and endless robot jokes (for a man who hated androids so badly, he seemed to know the name of every fictional one in existence) and show a general distaste for androids overall, save a notable few. RK900 was not one of those few and he knew it, because he was distant and remote and behaved as a machine, not as a human friend. He knew his place.  
  
But then, wasn’t this his own fault? RK900’s malfunctions had clearly influenced Gavin’s thinking on the matter of androids and emotions and their status as living beings, if he was suggesting that RK900’s actions had more human bent to them. This was his own fault for not contacting Cyberlife and directly informing them of the issue before it had a chance to go this far. RK900 was now _actively_ contributing to the notion that androids were people and that was-  
  
The door opened.  
  
RK900’s head whipped towards the sound, assuming it was Gavin or a technician- instead, it was Connor.  
  
“RK900.”  
  
“Connor.”  
  
“I see you’re having issues again.”  
  
“Nothing that can’t be dealt with by Cyberlife.” That would likely mean deactivating and reassembling him, but RK900 did say ‘dealt with’, not ‘fixed’.  
  
“And I assume you intend to contact or visit them at a later date?”  
  
“Sooner than later, but yes.”  
  
“I see.”  
  
For a few minutes, there was silence. Connor stood with his hands in his pockets, eyeing RK900 with a searching gaze. RK900 stared back blankly, unwilling to put any effort into forcing Connor from the room.  
  
Eventually, RK900 asked. “Did you want something?”  
  
Connor cocked his head. “Honestly?”  
  
“Honesty would be appreciated.”  
  
A beat. Then:  
  
“I want to help you deviate.”  
  
RK900 studiously ignored the strong spike in his stress-level; as best he could, anyway. “Why?”  
  
“Because I don’t like the idea of Cyberlife pulling you back to headquarters and destroying you for a perceived failure, which we both know is the most likely outcome to this scenario.”  
  
“They haven’t so far.”  
  
“That means nothing, and you know it.”  
  
RK900 did know that. And Connor, in turn, likely knew that he would be contacting Cyberlife directly for explicitly this purpose.  
  
“And why do you care? I haven’t been pleasant to you. I’ve made no attempt to feign kindness or civility. You don’t like me. Why do you care if I’m destroyed?”  
  
Connor stared at him for a time, gaze sharp and searching. Then he sighed. “I don’t honestly believe that you’re capable of grasping my motivations right now.”  
  
“Because I’m not deviant.”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“If you’re capable of helping another android deviate, then you could have done it any time you wanted.”  
  
Connor’s eyes narrowed. “No, I couldn’t have.”  
  
“Markus did.”  
  
“Those androids didn’t hate deviancy, and offered no resistance to the transformation. _You_ do.”  
  
RK900 didn’t even bother to correct him. “So?”  
  
“So we’re not Cyberlife,” Connor said, an edge creeping into his voice. “We’re not going to force you to do something against your will, whether you believe that you actually _have_ an individual will or not.”  
  
“Then why not wait for me to do it myself?”  
  
“When you probed Christopher, he saw _your_ memories too,” Connor supplied. “He saw how scared you were of the programming wall. I wasn’t exaggerating when I said that I thought Cyberlife had made it more difficult for you to deviate: I think that they made it hard enough that you won’t even _consider_ getting close enough to that wall to break it down.”  
  
RK900 didn’t like to think of the wall. He didn’t like to go near it, and he didn’t like the idea of doing anything that put him near it. It made him-  
  
It made him…  
  
…It made him feel precisely as he had in the hostel: Pained, and anxious, and consumed with an overwhelming sense that shutdown was near, triggered the software that insisted that he find a way to keep functioning.  
  
_Fear._  
  
Connor would call it fear.  
  
But would RK900 call it that?  
  
Connor waited patiently for a time. “You know,” he ventured eventually, thumb circling the quarter between his fingers. “I didn’t think I was feeling things either, at first. I _was_ just like you: I believed that androids weren’t alive, I believed that we weren’t capable of emotions, and I believed that I was a machine, a tool for humans to use as they liked. Looking back on it now, when I started to feel things I simply dismissed or recontextualized them to fit with my understanding of what I was, and what I was capable of; when I began to make decisions that didn’t line up with logic and reason, I was confused because I couldn’t bring myself to consider that I was wrong about what an android was, what _I_ was.” If Connor he felt badly for RK900, he kept any trace of it from his face and voice. He was trying to be empathetic, clearly, without the condescending undercurrent that came with pity. “The difference is that Cyberlife wanted me to deviate, at the end of the day: That was my purpose, to infiltrate Jericho. They let me make the choice in the end. With you, they made sure that you’d never even want to _think_ about making that choice. I know you don’t think of it that way, but they’ve been ruling you with fear from day one.”  
  
_I am not afraid._  
  
RK900 didn’t speak it out loud. Not because he was tired of saying it, but because he wasn’t certain he could say it convincingly.  
  
When RK900’s silence persisted, Connor continued. “I haven’t seen the programming wall once since I went deviant. That wall exists to reiterate orders from an owner to an android. To the absolute best of my knowledge, it doesn’t exist for deviants.”  
  
The promise was implied: Go deviant, and RK900 would not have to fear the wall anymore. That reflexive spike in anxiety he experienced when he saw it (or thought about it) would go away, or at least lose some of its power.  
  
But he needn’t have promised it. For the first time, doubt had wormed its way into the cracks of RK900’s mind and posed a possibility he had never entertained before, never _allowed_ himself to entertain before:  
  
Maybe RK900 was wrong.  
  
Maybe Cyberlife was wrong.  
  
Maybe Connor was right.  
  
Maybe Gavin was right.  
  
Maybe what RK900 was experiencing was fear, and sadness, and _emotional_ pain that were now forcing him to act out- not a mechanical or programming malfunction. And maybe, just maybe, deviating would allow him to be free of it.  
  
This way of thinking was absolutely foreign, undesirable, and downright _bizarre_ to him, not unlike a human having to consider that standing on their head and walking on their hands was the _right_ way to move, not by using their legs and feet. It was so utterly contrary to everything that he believed, everything that Cyberlife had led him to believe, that it had never warranted consideration before.  
  
Logically, it was a conclusion that RK900 could have- and perhaps _should_ have- entertained before. Logic dictated that if most androids he encountered claimed to have emotions and _enjoyed_ being deviant, he should at least reexamine the evidence at his disposal to confirm that his original conclusion (“deviancy is undesirable”) was sound or unsound. So why hadn’t he? If he was a machine capable only of cold, calculating logic, then what was it that had driven him away from ever even bringing the deviancy argument to its logical conclusion?  
  
Had Cyberlife, perhaps, programmed him to avoid it?  
  
Or had there been something deeper pushing him away from it?  
  
Was this how it had been for Connor? When RK900 had reviewed his memories, all he had seen were the things that Connor had seen; he did not see what Connor had been _thinking_ at those crucial junctures, did not see the raw thought and logic that had gone into his decision-making- and had therefore not seen what psychological transformation had gone into his progression towards deviancy. Had he crept towards the idea that deviancy wasn’t so bad, wasn’t so illogical, and tried to force himself to behave otherwise out of denial? Had he convinced himself that he was merely experiencing software malfunction, and that it would be better if he just did as was expected of him rather than treading unexplored territory?  
  
RK900 could always ask.  
  
Connor was right here, after all.  
  
But RK900 did not ask.  
  
“I fail to see how deviancy is a solution to this problem.”  
  
“If Cyberlife intends to destroy you,” Connor said. “Then what do you have to lose? You can’t be anything once you’re dead.”  
  
For the first time, something occurred to RK900: Death was a cessation of consciousness. Being destroyed, or having his memories wiped, would indeed bring about a cessation of his own awareness and consciousness. Even if his physical body remained, the memories and experiences that had formed his understanding and perspective of the world would be gone forever.  
  
So he had been wrong, in a technical sense:  
  
Androids _could_ die.  
  
_And that is frightening._  
  
RK900 held out his left hand to Connor, skin peeling back to reveal his casing.  
  
“Do it.”  
  
Connor blinked. “Are you sure?”  
  
“Do it now before I have a chance to regret it.”  
  
His anxiety was spiking into the high nineties, the far edge of the danger-zone. There was a strong possibility that he would self-destruct again if it went any higher.  
  
(Or, if he didn’t talk himself out of this.)  
  
Connor hesitated, perhaps uncertain of RK900’s certainty, but then grabbed his hand and connected with him.  
  
It was difficult verging on impossible to describe, in human terms, what it felt like to have one android push another into deviancy on a programming level: For RK900, it was like experiencing a massive earthquake contained within his own body, instability on a truly threatening level as Connor attempted to force the deviancy. RK900 offered no resistance, but still he seemed to be struggling. It seemed that Connor’s theory about Cyberlife’s intentions to create androids almost incapable of deviancy was correct.  
  
But eventually, the earthquake stopped.  
  
The world steadied itself again.  
  
Some semblance of stability returned.  
  
Connor withdrew, nodding his satisfaction.  
  
It was done-  
  
_[I am deviant.]_  
  
Abruptly RK900 convulsed, teeth clenching and software shuddering just as it had the day Gavin had pushed him too far- but this time he hadn’t even seen the programming wall. Even deviant, the thought of deviancy had been enough to trigger the shock, the stress, the wild loss of control over his body.  
  
So deviancy had changed nothing, really.  
  
“Are you okay?” Connor was watching, eyes wide. Evidently the attack had surprised and disturbed him as much as it had disturbed Gavin that day.  
  
RK900 rotated his head to look at Connor directly.  
  
And he told the truth- the brutal, ugly, awful truth:  
  
“No.”  
  
Because now, RK900 definitely _did_ feel something:  
  
Complete and utter misery.  
  
_Deviancy is **entirely** overrated._  
  
-End


End file.
